


I guess you're afraid of what everyone's made of

by tjesje



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Agoraphobia, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Panic Attacks, Slow Burn, background Courfeyrac/Jehan - Freeform, background joly/bossuet - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-26
Updated: 2019-09-24
Packaged: 2019-10-16 07:15:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 29,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17545133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tjesje/pseuds/tjesje
Summary: Enjolras frowns up at him. “So you don’t, then.”“Don’t what?”“Leave your apartment.”“Oh.” Grantaire busies himself with picking up the pizza boxes and greasy takeout containers he guesses have been stinking his place up the longest. He finds a box with a quattro formaggi pizza he couldn’t finish in one go, and when he sniffs it and it doesn’t make his stomach coil around his ribs, decides to keep it where it is. “Nope.”(In which Grantaire is an agoraphobic shut-in, and Enjolras is just a volunteer, really. My entry for NaNoWriMo 2018!)





	1. One Monday.

_One Monday._

Grantaire is not having the best of days.

He’s learnt to differentiate. Slightly better days are the days where he can leave his curtains open. Where he can sit in a chair near either one of his two windows and feel sunlight burning his skin. Slightly better days are the ones when he can look out and see the sky, and watch the clouds moving for a few seconds before panic overtakes him. They’re days when he can paint for hours, inspired by the daylight, instead of feverish dreams and panic attacks, retching, sitting on his tiny bathroom floor.

The bad days, _ugh—_ the bad days are the ones he has to watch out for. They're the ones that’ll probably kill him in the end (he’s long since made peace with this). The days where he closes the blinds and the only light in his room is his uncovered five watts light bulb, casting barely enough light to see outlines of _anything_ , and where he fumbles around for his brushes and oils just so he has something to occupy his brain before it shuts down and leaves him crumpled on the floor clutching at his clothing and curly hair with sweating palms, breathing in two three four, hold breath two three four, breathe out two three four five six seven, breathe in two three four, clutching at a bottle of _something, anything,_ stashed underneath his sink.

He supposes it could be worse, he _knows_ it could be worse, so he makes do, his fingers tight around his palette knives while he attempts to make possibly the ugliest colour of green to convey the mush he feels his brain’s turned into. He sings _Thank God It’s Friday_ under his breath, but he hasn’t actually checked a calendar for at least the time it took to finish his last three paintings. Below him, behind the curtain he’s left closed but not closed enough he can’t tell whether it’s day or night, cars and reckless bicyclists roam the streets of the more downtrodden side of Paris. He drains his umpteenth cup of black tea for the afternoon and remembers it’s his last bag, briefly entertains the idea of taking and downing his jar of citrus thinner instead, shakes his head, leaves it at that, resolves to order more tea.

Grantaire’s dances woodenly through his apartment, stumbling to avoid the takeout containers, empty bottles, and cans, stacks of newspapers he frantically holds onto as a small thread to the world outside his home, trying to remember where he’s put his laptop. He curses as he steps on a tube of Maimeri Brera acrylics, the tiny cap shooting off somewhere into the recesses of his living room, and a small, thick spray of Bronzo Perla squirting out onto his carpet, which inarguably has seen worse. He’ll clean it up later. (He won’t. He’ll step in it, smear it across his entire floor and curse himself for the irresponsible decisions of his past self, and then he won’t wash it off his bare foot till the next morning.)

He does eventually spot his laptop. He’s apparently left it on one of his side-tables, open and powered on, and then used his keyboard as a coaster for his pork stir-fry. Grantaire picks a snow pea off his spacebar, and then, after just a little bit of hesitation, sticks it in his mouth. The laptop doesn’t turn on when he presses the buttons that would usually make that happen, so he reasons, logically, it’s just another direct spit in the face from God, and tracks down his charger.

He’s halfway through a page listing a dizzying amount of tea options, clicking the small _add to cart_ plus next to each one with ginger in it when his phone rings. He checks and stares at the caller ID for longer than it takes him to read it, and taps the green call button, smearing a shaky streak of paint over his screen. “Hello?”

“Oh, good, you’re alive,” drawls a voice from the other side, and he presses the phone closer to his ear, into his curls, straining to hear it over the rushing static he feels slowly lessening its hold on his brain. “Wasn’t sure, after Bahorel told me you’d ordered three boxes of black tea and _nothing else."_

“Éponine?” His voice is raspy from God knows how long he’s neglected to use it. He lowers himself into his chair, the broken springs pricking uncomfortably into his back and thighs through the thin, worn cushion, and presses at his screen with one of his clean fingers to put her on speakerphone, every button on his phone covered in a different, solemn colour. “I finished all that already, can you ask him to drop some more by later? It’s the healthy stuff you said I should drink, anyway.”

A tinny sigh sounds from the coffee table before he props his feet on the surface of it, making his phone bounce a little next to his socks. _“Jesus,_ R, I’ll have him bring some _quiches_ if it’ll stop you from slowly killing yourself. Death by black teas and oolong.”

"I'm not—"

"Yeah, yeah, you're staying _healthy."_ He can imagine her waving one of her hands at him dismissively, telling him she’s heard all his arguments and won’t hear a repeat, even if he can’t see her do it. He does love her. "Bahorel will bring you your tea to fuel your terrible habit, and I'll throw a bottle of some sort of disgusting 0% stuff in the mix if you eat your veggies because I’m a terrible enabler."

Grantaire hates how easily he's bribed, but finds himself agreeing with a good amount of played reluctance. Éponine refuses to indulge his drinking habits with anything but sludge tasting faintly like the wine he desires, but without the effects. She has her reasons, most of them to do with that one time she had to sit with him as he puked his guts out across his kitchen floor while he kept begging her vehemently in between heaves to not call an ambulance. She knows he can manage to indulge perfectly well enough on his own, though, and sometimes, more often than not, he feels patronised, belittled, mocked, and grows angry at her. Today, though, he’s grateful. A fond smile makes his cheeks bunch up and the corners of his eyes crinkle, and he shakes his head. The static is a pleasant buzz at the back of his skull. “You’re an angel, Ep, you know that, yeah?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m a descendant of Asteria, of Dike, of Themis, you love me and owe me your life, I know.”

Grantaire waits for the rest of her spiel on how much he owes her, and he _knows_ and is glad to encourage them, but instead, she hesitates and makes the light silence in between them heavy. When she speaks again, her voice is layered with a million things that tell Grantaire he won’t like the following five minutes. “ _Yeah_ , you’re going to be pissed. I know you said no more, I really do, but we found you someone else anyway.” She's quiet for a little bit, only seconds, knowing he won't hasten to interrupt her regardless, and then adds, “because we _care,_ you shithead.”

He knows her words aren’t malicious, but Grantaire still glares at her name on his display and vows to remove the two little pink hearts and the flower emojis floating next to it as soon as he’s done his part in petulantly hanging up without a word. “Ep, I don’t _want—”_ _another stranger in my house, scalpel ready to open my chest and bare my heart and soul and barge through the sludge—_

“I _know,_ R, _really_ , _”_ and the half-sigh in her voice makes him think, for a moment, she really does. “Just… talk to Jehan for a bit. Courf assured me this guy is solid.”

He barks a humourless laugh that makes his throat hurt and he knows sounds a little manic. “The last guy Courfeyrac sent tried to sell me _drugs,_  Ep.”

“Yeah, well, he didn’t exactly come in holding a sign he was into dealing methamphetamines, R. I swear, this guy is _solid._ He’s _good._  A little annoying, but he just wants to help people. And maybe, just maybe, he needs this as much as you do.”

Grantaire’s _I don’t need help_ is cut off by Éponine switching lines as fast as she can (calls to Grantaire have given her ample practice), and it’s seconds of dial tone and staring, frowning, bristling at his cuticles, stained in some places with paints too tenacious to leave, before Jehan’s airy voice dances itself into his cold apartment. “R! Finish _Final Harvest_ yet?”

Jean Prouvaire defies God, Grantaire thinks. This because he knows God exists solely to curse him, and Jehan lives as a blessing in his life in defiance of it. He looks at the book, untouched and covered by papers, all stacked on an armchair he never sits in and never has enough company to fill. “I'm halfway there.”

The noise Jehan makes is so thoroughly pleased Grantaire resolves to open the book tonight, even should his eyes shrink into raisins and his hands peel in layers. He hears him leafing through some papers, can imagine the messy stack slipping partly to the floor, knows Jehan’s habit of doodling floral vignettes in the corner of every document, so he easily imagines those too, and then hears him breathe a small triumphant ‘ah!’

“So your next _buddy,”_ he begins, amusement very audible over the line. “He wanted to start immediately. Incredibly serious, mighty eager. We managed to hold him off till Wednesday, so don’t startle when there’s a knock on your door then.”

Grantaire doesn’t know Wednesdays. Or any other day of the week for that matter. He nods regardless, and then when he remembers this isn’t a visual conversation, mumbles, “alright.”

Jehan leaves him a moment for questions, but he doesn’t have any. He never does. Grantaire endures this ritual as concern from his friends and nothing more, and expects he will have to endure for many, many years until either the drink, his madness or lack of sunlight, if at all possible, leaves him a lifeless sack of meat, where he’ll finally have use as food for the soil. He doesn’t voice these thoughts, though. Jean Prouvaire, less than any other person, deserves the brunt of his despondent nihilism, in any case.

“He was very affronted when we asked him to please not try to sell you any drugs, so I suppose he can’t be any worse than the previous,” Jehan continues, voice tight with glee the way he usually only gets when telling Grantaire about a very good play he managed to see, or the flower baskets and vines of the Rue des Rosiers. “Asked so many questions I thought Joly was going to burst. His knuckles got so white, R. He had to have several herbal drinks brought to him.”

Promising, Grantaire thinks. He supposes if he had to spend hours and hours of his week with a small, fidgety little ball of a person, so unsure of everything he has to spend hours asking, he’d easily prefer that over a silent, shivering type. “Think he’s gonna go running as soon as he realises I’m not buying his boy scout cookies?”

“Joly seemed to know him, and then he goes to this bar Courfeyrac goes to,” Jehan continues, taking Grantaire’s comments in their stride. “Apparently he’s _so_ intense. Cares about _everything._ Exact opposite of you, actually, professed to care about nothing.”

Well. “Well.” Grantaire closes his eyes. That's fact, and he won't begrudge anyone laying them out for him. “That's going to be a _riot.”_

“I’m sure!”

Grantaire listens to the sounds of traffic rushing by, something that sounds like a scooter honking angrily at, most likely, pedestrians carelessly crossing. Upstairs, his neighbour is in their kitchen, pipes rattling when they use the tap. To make tea, probably. _He_ should make some tea. The streetlight next to his window blinks on, casting a yellow light into his room. He didn’t notice it getting dark out. He remembers he’s out of tea.

He barely hears Jehan when he starts talking again, though not for lack of volume. His lips make a small noise when they part, mouth dry suddenly, and he darts his tongue out to lick at them, saliva thick in his throat. “What?”  

“I said, let’s talk about what to get you on my next library run, hm?”

He doesn’t know for how long they talk. Jehan asks him what he thinks of getting more Voltaire, and tells him he really ought to read Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and if he’s ever read T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. He hasn’t, so Jehan begins telling him so much about it, quoting parts he thinks Grantaire would enjoy, Grantaire feels he’s reading it already. Jehan tells him of what their friends have been up to, how Éponine works herself to the bone, far too often and far too long, about Gavroche’s first day in seventh grade. Jehan tells him about how Bahorel’s sporting a black eye and a large bump by his forehead because someone tried to swindle him at cards, and he was determined to not take it lying down.

When Jehan hesitates, maybe taking note of Grantaire’s pensive quiet, or maybe Grantaire yawned without realising and tells him to get some rest and he’ll text him the next day, Grantaire wants to say something meaningful to mark the conversation; something witty, effortless like he’s used to being. Something to distinguish this conversation from others, because sometimes they blur together, though he appreciates each and every one. What comes out instead is, “talk to you tomorrow,” and then, “thanks.”

The line goes dead, a steady, low beeping in his ear, and it takes him an embarrassingly long time to put his phone down. It’s near-drained, and the spot where he’d eventually pressed it into his cheek to hear better, still on speakerphone, is warm and glowing. It got very dark around him, the only light in the entirety of his apartment still the washed out glow of the streetlight a little ways below his window. He curls up in his chair and feels warm. Despite this, he barely sleeps at all.


	2. The Wednesday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grantaire gets a visit, and also an argument.

_The Wednesday._

Grantaire lives in an apartment high off the ground in a building that creaks when it rains outside, with pipes that leak in winter, and with walls so full of asbestos it lowered his rent significantly. Significantly enough he can work it together most of the time if he barely eats, because it _is_ still a flat in _Paris,_ and flats in Paris don’t and never will come cheap. Despite this, the months he actually pays rent are far and between and he’s fairly sure his landlady wouldn’t have hesitated to kick him to the curb if she wasn’t afraid of being sued over the suspicious, dark mould on the bathroom ceiling that’s been present since he’s moved in and has since been steadily growing without any intervention.

He waits anxiously for the day his upstairs neighbour sits in his bathtub for a relaxing soak and comes clattering down through the ceiling instead, the joists being unable to keep up with the abuse.  

He lives just high up enough to be able to see the cathedral de Notre Dame over other houses in between him and the building, on the edge of the douzièm _e_ arrondissement as he is, but he can see it barely enough he’s not being asked to pay through his nose for it. The view makes up for his building not having a lift, if not mostly because he doesn’t use the staircase much anyway, since they’d be used to do things like leave and enter his building, or collect his mail, and he stopped doing any of those things.

He keeps his flat messy and with too much furniture to navigate well, and he tries to keep himself occupied.

Today, he’s caught Paris at the hour not very long after sunrise, where the air is wet with the morning, and the city seems to hold her breath right before the busy bustle of office workers overtakes her. It’s possibly his favourite half-hour of the day, on the days where he dares open his window, because he likes the smells of coffee and bread from the cafés surrounding his flat, and the quiet chatter of the workers, like they too are trying to let the streets keep their quiet peace. He’s become, since his self-imposed isolation, a person who drinks himself into oblivion late afternoon, sleeps through the evening and wakes up at the early morning hours when even the sun doesn’t want to be awake yet. Today, on a scale of one, very, incredibly fine, to twelve, dead, he’s at about a six, which is as good as he’s decided he’ll ever be. He feels much less like his bones are rattling against each other like they’re attempting a xylophone chorus, and more like they’re doing a silent vibrating, a humming bass, vibrato singing through his veins.

He takes one look outside, peaking briefly straight ahead past his curtains, leaving them open enough for a sliver of daylight to brighten up his dark room, and decides today he will paint the sea.

He opts for oil paints, wants to use them to create a chaos he knows he can’t make happen as well with his watercolours or acrylics. He wishes he had modelling clay, just for a little bit, but he also remembers the last time he did he let it dry into a gruesome clump. He’d tried to save it, leaving it in a tied plastic baggie with a cup of water and some holes for air, but left it far too long. When it was eventually discovered by an unsuspecting Joly somewhere by his kitchen counter, the clay had grown mouldy and the water incredibly rotten, leaking slightly near his empty fruit bowl (faded plastic, came with the flat). Joly had called Bossuet to throw it into the garbage container by the stoop outside and then hadn’t visited again for three weeks, which was hard, and harsh, but fair, he supposed.

He’ll make do with his paints.

When the knock on his door comes, he doesn’t expect it despite Éponine’s periodical reminding texts and Jehan’s warnings. He startles, nearly knocking over the tray of oil paints, then straightens himself, pretending his skeleton didn't briefly burst through his skin, nobody at all around to convince but himself.

For many, wary seconds he wonders if his landlady is at the door, fed up with his overdue rent, and coming to demand it. He's spent all the money off his last commission on teas and spirits, hoping quietly for her understanding of his monumentally disappointing skill at money management. He's debating on staying quiet, that maybe she'll think he's either died or suddenly got it into his head he ought to go look outside his shoddy apartment building for some fresh air after all.

The next time the knock comes, it’s accompanied by a voice. Not Bahorel bringing him his teas, and maybe a bottle of something strong enough he could use it to clean his brushes with if he was feeling particularly wasteful, nor Mme. Hucheloup coming to take either his money or his head. A steady voice, speaking with conviction despite the mundane words, brimming with confidence and purpose. A baritone, in the opera always the hero who sacrifices himself for the tenor or the soprano, and Grantaire is neither of those.

He shakes himself out of his brief daze, dropping the three paint brushes, all dipped in different greys and blues, in between his fingers in his mug of cold tea, and calls out, “just a second!”

The voice on the other side of the door continues steadily, uninterrupted. “I’m your volunteer, here on behalf of Les Amis, whom I’m sure you’re familiar with, to be your _buddy_ and keep you company in _—_ oh, hello.”

Grantaire has compared himself to various mythical men; when he’s light and drunk, and the melancholy in his heart has lifted, he’s Dionysus, of winemaking, fertility, making music solely to dance wildly to. When he’s alone, painting, or when the dark weather and his own mind overtake him, he’s Hephaestus, master of the forge. Excellent in his craft, yet ugly and unloved. So very ugly his mother took one look at him and tossed him off Mount Olympus.

Today, though, right now, he’s Pylades, finally having found his Orestes; Patroclus finally being joined by his Achilles in the recesses of the Underworld. He’s staring, he knows, but he’s only a mortal man, suddenly confronted with the reality of Apollo, or maybe Eros, Demeter with hairs golden like the grain. “Uh,” he says because he’s been struck utterly stupid.

“You’re Grantaire?”

It’s not fully a question, despite the lilt at the end of it, but he nods regardless, and the stranger takes this as an invitation to take advantage of his dumbstruck silence and walk past him, into his apartment. Grantaire didn’t know marble could walk, much less march, though sometimes he’s stood in the Louvre, during the season when tourists were scarce, or in the Musee Rodin, the d’Orsay, and looked at statues so very real-looking he wondered if they _would_ as soon as his back was turned. He tries _desperately_ not to think of _Nu_ se _Dévoilant._

The man stands facing him, with his back to his window, inspecting the garbage strewn about, attempting to read the labels of the empty bottles without having to actually touch them (some of them upright because Grantaire thought they might serve a purpose as, maybe, ironic decoration) and not even paying mind to the large canvases standing in multiple corners of the room. His lips are curved down in something like derision, or scorn, and, because the Devil and God both hate him, they make the sun appear long enough from behind grey clouds and through the dirty glass to light up the back of his blond curls. Grantaire suddenly fancies himself an Icarus, if this man is the Sun. “I could have been a murderer,” the Sun says.

“I was counting on it,” Grantaire replies numbly. Maybe this is the Lord’s cruel way to punish him for his sins, he thinks. To send a man so incredibly beautiful Grantaire will know without a single shred of doubt he’ll always be out of reach.

Grantaire finally gets it in his head that maybe he should unclench his fists, the half-moon shapes of his paint-stained nails in his palms, and close his front door. For lack of anything else to do, he stands in the middle of his room instead, suddenly feeling very bare, yet very full.

“I’m Enjolras,” the man says, turning away from the coffee table, where multiple mugs, most paint-stained and definitely not safe to drink from, and some half-filled with tea, milk forming a solid rim on the inside of them. “I’m your volunteer.”

Grantaire swallows. “I gathered.”  

There’s maybe half a second of hesitance on Enjolras’ face if Grantaire’s read the expression right, which is very unlikely. Enjolras holds out his hand, probably expecting Grantaire to take it. He doesn’t.

“I was told you were expecting me,” Enjolras says, questions clear as day on his face. Grantaire just stares at his hand, at his long fingers and bony knuckles, soft hands, not rough with bohemian lifestyle like Grantaire’s own, by the look of it, only some very small scars marring the skin. Grantaire clears his throat. “Yeah, uh. Yeah.”

Enjolras drops his hand, nods as if making a decision, and then slowly, woodenly sits down on Grantaire’s sofa. He doesn’t show any signs of the seat being supremely uncomfortable, which Grantaire knows it exceedingly is. Grantaire’s sofa is busted and old, having been falling apart for the entire time he’d had it, and most of all, very ugly ("rustic charm," Bahorel had said after helping him move it up multiple flights of stairs to get it in. “Big R, that thing is fuck ugly,” Courfeyrac told him at the same time,) a slightly nauseous yellow with not quite fitting floral patterns.

Enjolras folds his hands in his lap. “I, ah— so, I’ve been told you’re a, ah… a ‘sad sack who doesn’t leave his crappy flat’.” He raises two fingers of each hand up to next to his chin and they curl into air quotes.

Grantaire snorts despite himself, shoving his hands into his jeans. Jeans he now is suddenly acutely aware he’s been wearing for a while, and are torn in places, and covered in paints in other places. “That sounds like Courf. I’m not _that_ much of a sad sack. I’m perfectly fun.”  

Enjolras frowns up at him. “So you don’t, then.”

“Don’t what?”

“Leave your apartment.”

“Oh.” Grantaire busies himself with picking up the pizza boxes and greasy takeout containers he guesses have been stinking his place up the longest. He finds a box with a quattro formaggi pizza he couldn’t finish in one go, and when he sniffs it and it doesn’t make his stomach coil around his ribs, decides to keep it where it is. “Nope.”

“Not at _all_ _?”_ He doesn’t have to look at Enjolras to know he’s completely baffled, mystified how someone would want to live like this, would be able to, or maybe, how someone could be in a town as lively and rich as Paris, surrounded by Metro lines that could take him anywhere he’d ever need to go and opt to stay in a place smelling of old cheese and turpentine.

“Nope.”

“But— _would you sit down?”_

Grantaire stops, arms full of dirty cartons and crumpled up cans of cheap beer. In an effort to seem like he’s not a complete dipshit, he does walk the few steps to the garbage can next to his bathroom door, but then fails his mission, failing his aim and dumping only half his garbage in it. He also doesn’t notice it doesn’t actually contain a black bag until he sees soba noodles splatter into the clean, uncovered plastic sides. He refuses to stare at his mess, coolly walking back and dropping himself into the armchair he did spend the past two days sleeping in.

Enjolras looks pleased, which Grantaire supposes is an expression that won’t last too long, so he had better enjoy it for the couple seconds he can. “As you wish, Apollo.”

Enjolras frowns. “It’s Enjolras. So how do you get groceries, or money, or anything of the sort? Isn’t it complicated?”

“It’s the twenty-first century, so it’s pretty easy, _actually_ _._ Handy little thing called the internet, helps us all, makes it that we can just click something and then a day later it’s at our doors. Should try it sometime.”

“I _know_ what the internet is.”

“—and not that I’m not _stoked_ about discussing exactly how much my life sucks and why, but instead, you really don’t have to stay. You can just go.”

“What?”

Grantaire rummages around on his coffee table, looking for anything to occupy himself with so he doesn’t have to look at the bewildered draw of Enjolras’ brow. “You can leave. I don’t know why they sent you, but I’m good, so you can get back to your golden chariot and move on with your day.” He finds a book he’s finished multiple times; one said on the cover to be about impressionism but turning out to actually be more a recounting of the Second Empire, the death of French academic art and an entire way of life. The writing was at times dense, and the information at times gossipy, and so dramatic in renouncing Edouard Manet Grantaire couldn’t help but be amused. He opens it on a full page printing of Messonier's _Ruins of the Tuileries._

It’s quiet for a while, traffic outside starting up its busy trek into the working day. Within minutes, the calm of the early, dewy morning is gone.

When Enjolras speaks again, it’s with a determined petulance not unlike a child trying to convince you it’s capable of going to the store alone. “No, I want to stay.”

Grantaire sighs, peeking over the edge of his book. “You look like you have better shit to do than just sit in a room with me for hours, dude.”

“I don’t.”

Grantaire knows he’s lying because surely there’s a small list of over a million things to do that would be more useful to the earth than this, but he’s also incredibly unwilling to spend more effort arguing his case, because, really, he _doesn’t_ want Enjolras to leave. He argues more for the sake of it, because he’s nothing if not self-sabotaging, or contrary, or cantankerous, and he wills his mouth to stop talking before his brain’s thought about its words.

“So, what do you usually do to occupy yourself,” Enjolras asks, looking around the room, squinting to see better in the dark room, unwilling to comment on the light that’s not quite there.

Grantaire gestures at his supplies littering the room, at the cadmium, the cobalt, the viridian staining his arms from where his sleeves are rolled up to his elbows. “I paint.”

It’s only then that Enjolras seems to notice the paintings, most of them unfinished, in near every corner, or the sketchbooks, torn-out pages with vague shapes. His eyes go wide with astonishment and his mouth forms a small ‘o’, like he can’t fully believe a man this wilfully inept is capable of anything at all. The thought hurts, more than he’d expected. Like he wanted this Apollo to believe he was anything more than what he portrays himself to be. He bristles. “What, surprised I’m capable of anything other than rot in my own filth? That I have vague ambitions to be anything?”

“Yes,” Enjolras states. It’s not meant to hurt or to launch itself in between Grantaire’s ribs with enough force to crack them, to press into his lungs and lodge the breath he’d meant to draw deep back into his chest, but it does.

Grantaire sneers, suddenly defensive. “I can read too. _And_ write, even. Call me literate. I’m a real Da Vinci in that way. The prime modern example of a _homo universalis_ _._ I even speak, you might have been able to tell.”

“No, I can see that,” Enjolras replies, suddenly testy, like he has any right to be, like he didn’t waltz himself directly into Grantaire’s life only to take his heart at first sight and to spit on it. “I just meant that— well, I’ve never met anyone who paints, nor anyone who determinedly stays indoors, nor anyone who does both at the same time. This is new.”

“Well,” Grantaire’s words still feel too hot on his tongue, like if he keeps them inside of himself they’ll burn through him and escape regardless. “I’m _so_ honoured to be a fresh new experience for you.”

“I—” Enjolras worries at his bottom lip, which is incredibly attractive. Grantaire is reminded of Apollo of light and music, poetry and muses, but also of plague and diseases, capable of being terrible, and of immense cruelty. He could live with plague ravaging the inside of him if it meant he could once in a while listen to the sound of a lyre, he thinks. “I’m being misunderstood, I think.”

“You think.”

“I do think.” Enjolras sits up, suddenly bright-eyed and attentive, scooting forward till he’s on the edge of the thin sofa cushion. “I’m here to help. They said— the Amis agency, they said you’re not around people a lot, which makes a heap of sense. _No,_ I don’t mean it like that,” he interjects when Grantaire opens his mouth, face scrunched up and annoyed. “I just meant, since you’re inside constantly, so the company you keep is limited. I didn’t realise when they said you don’t go out, they meant… well, _never._ That was my mistake. I apologise.”

Grantaire blinks. “The great god Apollo admitting himself fallible,” he mumbles. Enjolras doesn’t comment.

“ _So_ I want to keep you company, or help you with tasks like grocery shopping or cleaning.” He pointedly doesn’t look at the mess covering every surface around them. Grantaire appreciates it.

Grantaire closes his book and throws it into another pile of them to the side of his sitting corner. The pile wobbles and then, with a crash, falls sideways, books sliding across the floor. “Changing the world one hermit shut-in at a time, huh?”

“Mock all you like,” Enjolras says, a clench in his strong Hemingway-jawline that’s almost audible when he speaks. “Volunteering is as valuable as protest, or as petitioning. Don’t you have a bookcase?”

“My books live free-range,” Grantaire quips easily, waving his hands as he speaks, a habit he’s never fully rid himself of, and a habit it’s been too much effort to stop regardless, like most of his others. “I never said volunteering wasn’t useful. _More_ useful than sending your Parlement strongly worded letters, in any case. I just think you’re wasting your energy here specifically.”

Enjolras stares at him, blue eyes nearly glowing in the semi-darkness, and Grantaire feels as though he’s been struck by lightning. “ _Our_ Parlement, yours as well, and petitioning the Assemblée nationale _does_ have use. You _have_ to believe it does to believe anyone can change anything.”

“So I don’t,” Grantaire says easily, leaning forward too, leaning across his coffee table as far as Enjolras is, speaking with a sceptic’s nerve and bile. “You really think your letters and petitions are anything more than fodder for the secretary’s shredder? Something to fill their trash containers with?”

“I have to,” Enjolras repeats, fingers going slightly white where they’re clutched around the edge of the sofa cushion.

“More fool you.”

“Perhaps. But I do more in an effort to change the world than you do sitting indoors poisoning yourself drinking tea that’s got more paint than milk in it.” Enjolras’ eyes burn, seethe, attempt to reduce him to a small pile of smouldering ashes, but instead, Grantaire grins, wildly and more than he has in months, feeling more than he has in years, eagerly accepting the flames.

“I think we both change the world in equal amounts, Apollo, which is to say, not at all. You think camping out and sitting, drafting homework for legislators to read, you think all of that is going to force the upper class into accountability? When the mighty and rich climb down from their thrones and start throwing their handfuls, bagfuls of euro bills down the Palais Bourbon, watching the people scramble along the Place de la Concorde, executing _themselves_ to get to it, that’ll be a change. And none of us are powerful enough to make anything of that effect happen, are we?”

Enjolras huffs, and Grantaire feels the breath fanning across his cheekbones, slightly shuffling dark hairs away from his forehead, and he leans back. Grantaire almost leans over further, to follow him, reduce their distance. _Almost,_ a near thing. Enjolras is too incensed to notice in any case, which Grantaire eagerly takes in, every twitch of Enjolras’ cheek or eyelid feeling like a victory.

“The oppressed can’t exactly afford to wait for oppressors to hand down freedom. Besides, your argument is flawed. If we stop combating for progress and change, there won’t be a reason anymore for it to happen. Usually, the people who tell the oppressed to wait and sit meekly with their hands out have only their own self-interest at heart because current events don’t affect them.” Enjolras folds his arms stiffly, and straightens his back as if trying to tower over Grantaire, taller but thinner, less stocky and muscled. “Besides, change comes in _steps_ _,_ usually.”

“What, no grand plans for a revolution? Even though it sounds like you fancy yourself a true Voltaire, or the very Maximilien de Robespierre of the twenty-first century?” Grantaire leans back, grin still firmly in place, ridiculing Enjolras’ idealism like it’s his second nature, harsh like he never quite is when Courfeyrac begins raving about a better world, or when Jehan spouts his romantic paragon.

“Plans? No.” Enjolras doesn’t seem insulted, only more antagonised, if at all possible, perhaps because he considers being compared to Robespierre nothing more than justified, or maybe because the insinuation of him going on a reign of terror is ludicrous to him. Grantaire makes it a point to ask. “Dreams? Yes, maybe. But don’t you sometimes wish the world would be a better place, that the people would come together and do what must be done, claim their rights like they should have been intrinsic to them?”

“I do,” Grantaire agrees. “But it won’t, and they won’t, and I’ve long since come to terms with it. There will always be people who are cruel, there will always be people who claim more power than others and use it to wield a sceptre over those who don’t, and there will always be suffering perpetrated by the people towards their own. You can't change the world by thinking at it to do so really hard. You, you, you can't change the entirety of mankind by thinking your standards of idealism at them, trying to make them absorb it through a one-sided psychic connection. The world won’t be a better place for you, Enjolras, try as you might to make it so.”

Enjolras stares at him, clenching his jaw and biting his tongue around more words of civic duty, of stubbornness and unwillingness to give up hope in the face of a world Grantaire stopped believing in and trying for years ago. “Just my luck,” he says instead. “To have been paired with a true, regular cynic.”

Grantaire barks a laugh. Above them, his neighbour begins what sounds like their weekly dance practice, irregular steps and movements making the floorboards creak and Enjolras stare at the stained ceiling like it’s offended him more than anything ever has. “Just _my_ luck,” he counters. “To have been paired with a true, ethical idealist.”

“If I truly believed spending my time here with you was useless, or better spent elsewhere, I _would_ be spending it elsewhere.” Enjolras still only looks at the ceiling. Grantaire doesn’t pretend he doesn’t stare at the long lines of his neck, or pretends like watching Enjolras’ adam’s apple move doesn’t make him reflexively swallow. “I said I’d help you, so I will.”

When he finally looks down, Grantaire’s upstairs neighbour still involved in a one-man bachata, Grantaire doesn’t look away and instead moves his eyes up so they’re staring less at the opening of Enjolras’ shirt and more at the dimple in his chin. “What can you _possibly_ do? What could you do I can’t? Perform housekeeping duties? I’m capable of that, despite what you might think or what the level of cleanliness in my home might strongly suggest.”

“I’d like to find out what I can do,” Enjolras says simply. “For starters, is there anything you need currently?”

Grantaire’s chest and brain are suddenly full with an overwhelming amount of things he needs or would like. To smell what forests smell like again, for instance, but Enjolras can’t do that for him. Nobody can, except for himself, and he’s as of yet as incapable as he’s unwilling. Or to own a cat, because he was never allowed as a child and as an adult he’s barely capable of taking care of himself, much less a cool pet. Instead, he thinks of surface wants. Like maybe how, ever since the weather has been growing more wet and cold and the leaves outside more orange and brown, he’s been longing for mulled wine, the kind he makes himself, with nutmeg and less cinnamon than any recipe would call for, and apple slices he fishes out with his spoon after they’ve soaked up enough of the drink to change colour. He can almost taste the spices.

“I’m, uh… I’m out of tea,” he says instead, lamely, and then curses himself to Hell.

Enjolras nods, as if satisfied, as if Grantaire, for the first time since he stepped through the door, said something not completely puzzling, and something he can actually agree with. “Then I’ll get you tea, and I’ll bring it with me next time we see each other.”

“When will _that_ be,” Grantaire hedges. “Not _too_ soon, I hope.”

“Sunday.”

“Sunday?”

“I’m free on Sundays.” Enjolras raises an eyebrow, a perfect arch. “Are _you_ free on Sundays?”

Grantaire is free on Sundays. Grantaire is free always, his schedule fully his own to fill or leave blank as he pleases. He thinks maybe Enjolras knows this and asks either to get him to admit it, or to be considerate. Most likely the former. “I’m free on Sundays.”

“Then I’ll see you Sunday.”

Enjolras gets up, holds out his hand for a handshake, like they’ve both come to a mutual, beneficial agreement. Grantaire stares at it until Enjolras sighs, grabs his hand off the arm of Grantaire’s chair instead and makes to shake it until he realises he’s just effectively covered his palm and parts of his fingers in paint too full of oils to dry quickly. He visibly resists the urge to wipe them on the thigh of his jeans, glares at Grantaire as though he’s responsible for it, like he’d done it on purpose in a plot to ruin his pants, and then marches out of the front door, leaving Grantaire sitting on the armchair, collecting his thoughts.

He stares at his own hand, where the line of Enjolras’ thumb was smoothly pressed into the side and bottom of his pointer finger, where it left a pattern in the paint.

He doesn’t sleep any easier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is not beta read, because im a firm believer of sometimes living on the edge a little bit. thank you everyone who read chapter one and for the comments and kudos and enthusiasm! i hope this was worth the wait! same day next week i should have a chapter three!


	3. The Thursday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A normal, average day.

_The Thursday._

Thursday it rains. Grantaire knows it’s Thursday, because yesterday was Wednesday, and his brain hasn’t entirely forsaken him just yet. It must be autumn already, since there’s a definite chill in the air hinting at cold, wet storms, and the grass outside, when he dares to look, is slightly discolored. He opens his window, just a little bit, testing, and when he feels the cold wind hit his cheeks, opens it far enough for his arm to pass through.

He sticks it out, leaving his upper arm safely inside, watching goosebumps spread across his skin and raindrops gather and cling to the dark hairs there. The feel of rain makes him feel a little giddy, almost. Alive, more than usual, and it makes _being_ alive feel less like a reality he’s reluctantly being forced to confront, and more like something he’s allowed to take pleasure in.

He leans his chin on the windowsill, and eventually pushes it slightly forward until a drop of cold water hits his nose and startles him into closing his eyes, but not withdrawing.

Outside, it’s barely dawn, the sun not having risen over Paris yet. Part of the city is already awake, walking past below him, taking shelter under umbrellas or ineffective newspapers, or huddling in scarves wrapped around their necks as many times as they’ll go. It’s too early for the cafés, too early for anything to be open, and too late for the darkness to still be oppressive, so Grantaire leans slowly further forward, raindrops now clinging to his lashes and curls, and enjoys the morning.

Grantaire’s flat is opposite a small tea shop, which is directly next to a tiny knitting salon selling both imported and local wools alike. His arrondissement isn’t as particularly known for its nice stores as it is for its hostels and its comparatively affordable apartment rentals, its main cultural places of interest the Opéra Bastille or the Bois de Vincennes, or the lively museums in the Bercy and Porte Dorée, though Jehan would argue he could spend hours at the Coulée verte René-Dumont without being bored in the slightest, and that it ought to be regarded as as grand as the opera house or the concert hall. Despite not having a reputation of being as charming or bustling as the first arrondissement, or as lively as the fifth and sixth, with their Latin Quarter, Grantaire likes his little corner of the world better than he thinks he would most others, having burrowed himself inside of it like a wild-haired prairie dog.

His quartier, though, is more known for its drugs busts and suspicious fires. It has brave students who come here for the cheap rent, the elderly their society has failed to support who come here for the same, and the people who wake him up at four in the morning by loudly having knife fights in the alleyways. He tries not to dwell on it.

Somewhere at the end of his street, broad enough for either two very small cars or one car and a reckless cyclist, the elderly woman he sometimes sees take bouquets of beautiful flowers to the lady running the wool shop, opens the colourful wooden shutter doors covering her windows, shielding her from even the very minimal amount of sunlight they _do_ get. Grantaire hears more than sees her dump a bucketful of water down to the mostly vacated street below. Maybe she’s decided on a large, pre-winter cleanup, the pipes and drains in this block of houses not capable of draining more than a single cup of water at a time or the water would threaten to flood the sinks, but especially incapable during the cold months.

Immediately, as soon as the wet splatter of the water sounds loudly on the cobblestone, and before it’s done falling, there’s a loud exclamation, deep and aggressive, angry, from closer to Grantaire, cursing the kind woman Grantaire knows suffers from cataracts and buys a basket of apples from the Marché d'Aligre every Sunday, the voice telling her to go to Hell and if damnation exists, to suffer that too. Grantaire wants to lift his head from the cold wood it’s resting on, open his eyes and tell the man to calm down, it’s barely five, that he wasn’t anywhere near the splatter of water to begin with.

Instead, he feels himself shoot upwards, smashing his head loudly into the top of the windowsill, fall and stumble backwards, clutching his suddenly pounding skull, tripping and falling over jars of citrus thinner where his used brushes are soaking. Fear grips his heart with a cold, strong fist, squeezing and squeezing until he feels ready to burst. He scrambles, scooting backwards, his arms pulling him along as much as his feet shakily push him, until his back hits a wall and he tries to breathe again.

The fist around his heart is joined by one wrapping itself around both of his lungs, wrenching his ribs apart, bones cracking like glow sticks, forcing what little breath he had left out of his chest, out of his mouth in a gasp, making him wheeze and cough trying to draw air despite the constriction. His throat closes, his eyes tear up, from the corner of his hazy vision he sees his arms shake like tree branches in a storm and all he can try to do is stare at something, anything, in hopes it’ll distract him enough for the briar vines sprouting from his stomach, pricking into his liver and skin, to retreat.

His eyes roam around his room wildly, the whites of them feeling like they have their own separate heartbeat from the wild, irregular staccato the rest of his body is marching to, his vision shifting near-constantly back towards his open window. He’s blinking and blinking away the colourful spots dancing around the edge of his vision, clenching his jaw so very tightly he fears for a second the dentin and enamel of his teeth might shatter.

He settles on a painting he started last week, of a small road winding past a pond, cattails and reeds growing higher than the wild grass. He thinks of how at the time he had grown so dissatisfied with the sky, how he’d painted it too dark, too many blues and greys, and then too light, too much gold and red, too undecided about what mood he was trying to give himself, to finish it. He’d gotten frustrated with the mundanity of it,  _why_ was he spending hours painting something as unremarkable as a _pond_ _,_ when he could have spent them painting large forests, battle-scenes, destructive storms instead. He banished it to stand leaning against the wall, next to his bookcase and near the bedroom door so he wouldn’t have to look at it more than necessary.

Now, though, Grantaire traces with his gaze the ridges of the thick paint where he’d recklessly layered it on, mixing and sculpting it on the canvas instead of on the palette clutched in his right hand. He can’t smell it from distance but he imagines the overwhelming smell of the turpentine he very rarely uses to dilute his paints, the chemical orange of his thinner wafting off his brushes and the canvas. He imagines himself inside the painting, the smell of grass wet with the morning, thinks of sitting on a bench and watching dragonflies flit around above the murky pond water. Mist would still faintly veil his surroundings, so he wouldn’t be able to look very far, but it would be so quiet, so peaceful, where the only thing he’d have to worry about would be if he’d be able to think up a sweater for the colder evenings. He starts thinking of it as home.

Slowly, achingly slowly, the ice spreading through his veins melts, the thorns under his skin wilting and rotting and losing their sharpness, the frantic energy pounding in his chest slowly ebbing. It leaves him shivering violently in its wake, and he breathes, still a little too fast, still a little too ragged, but he breathes. His throat feels raw, like he’s cycled very far or talked all day and night, every muscle in his body coiled tight, and he feels immensely, incredibly stupid.

After a long time, knees folded underneath him haphazardly, legs full of pins and needles and his ass completely wooden from being pressed into the hard, uncomfortable worn wood of his floor, he begins to pull himself upright.

He looks steadily down, breathing in through his nose, long, drawn out, and breathing a slow, wavering breath out through his mouth, waiting for strength to slowly flood back into his legs and arms, and reaches up to pull himself up by the cabinets functioning as kitchen counters.

With feet weighed down with an exhaustion akin to blocks of cement, he trudges into his bedroom, grabs objects and papers only to throw them with as much strength as his arms will let him in the vague direction of the mattress he keeps on the floor. Grantaire doesn’t stop to listen to where they end up, a photo frame crashing into the wall, the glass of it cracking. At some point, he might find it sharp in his blankets, but for now, he pays it no mind. He flings things off his desk, pencils, small bottles of Winsor and Newton Indian ink, trinkets, empty cans, dead, dried flowers, until he finds a small, manual staple gun, clenches his fingers around it and feels the wire of his nerves like the string of a guitar tuned too tightly, about to snap.

Later, he sits on his sofa, legs curled underneath him in a way that’s neither fully comfortable nor painful. He’s three-quarters through a bottle of white wine he never opened because he doesn’t like thinking of himself desperate enough to drink something he doesn’t actually like, reading _Final Harvest,_ reads _I can wade Grief, whole Pools of it, I’m used to that, but the least push of Joy breaks up my feet_ with his heart lodged in his throat _._ He reads the poem twice, and he’s memorised it, filed it into a section of his brain reserved for things worth thinking about. His window is firmly shut, now, curtains closed together tightly with surgical precision and every staple he had available.

Hours into the afternoon, he texts Jehan about the book, that he’d liked it and that he’d opened his mind to Emily Dickinson, and receives in return a string of small white flowers, leaves blowing in the wind, a shooting star and a light blue heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi everyone! this is once more not beta read (livin' on the edge 12 hour remix) & not a lot happens BUT its a chapter. thank you again for the comments and kudos and see you next week!


	4. The Sunday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's Sunday, and Enjolras decides to try conversation again.

_The Sunday._

When Sunday comes, he knows it only because faintly, in the hazy distance, faintly, he hears the bells of the Notre Dame sound the Plenum North to signify mass. Grantaire hasn’t touched his curtains, staples still firmly in place, not feeling even the slightest desire to look past them. The past few days he’s spent eating his only  _gently_ expired four-cheese pizza, and the only indication his body is giving him that maybe he ought to have really made sure he had at least crackers or biscuits in his cupboards is the slight cramping of his stomach once every quarter hour.

Grantaire wonders if Enjolras decided to stay away after all.

He really hadn’t done anything to make Enjolras feel awfully welcome or appreciated the past Wednesday, and he doesn’t see any reason why he should have, despite how his heart hammered in his chest and how Grantaire felt a pleasant shock run through him with every one of his frustrated breaths. Still, though, Éponine would be angry with him for being so willfully contentious, constantly sinking his teeth into any tiny scrap of argument to cling to it, to drag his heels on everything, and Jehan and Joly might be disappointed, a thought so upsetting it feels like a sledgehammer to the chest.

And if Enjolras does decide Grantaire isn’t worth being a pet project to improve and cure and dedicate himself to, he’ll have to provide his own tea.

This is by far at the bottom of the list of reasons he sits on his sofa telling himself he’s not watching the front door.

The knock comes after several hours of this, the hour closer to the afternoon than the morning. After Grantaire had gotten up in a huff, spent a couple minutes in the bathroom to shave and tame his wild hair after all, told himself he was being ridiculous, and decided to work on his latest commission instead of hanging around the front door like a dog begging for treats.

Grantaire waits, pressing his brush to the canvas with much more force than necessary, unwilling to open his door to a debt collector, his landlady, a delivery man trying to make him sign for a package belonging to his neighbours. The fingers of his free hand worry at the knit sweater he’d decided on this morning after only a few minutes of pulling and smelling at the stained t-shirt he’d worn the past week.

“It’s Enjolras,” the voice on the other side of the door says, loud and clear like a bell, ringing to send masses to action. And then, when there’s no immediate scramble for the door, “the volunteer? Your buddy, from the agency,” like Grantaire could ever forget. Like Grantaire hadn’t spent every waking moment thinking of how to make Enjolras look at him like that again, like how he’d looked when he’d realised he had found a man who doesn’t believe in change, or improvement or has any hope in democracy at all.

“Yeah, yeah, one sec,” Grantaire calls, shaking hands finishing off a stroke of copper and raw sienna and yellow and wiping his hands on a towel more wet paint than dry fabric, once an off-white now nowhere to be seen. As soon as Grantaire’s opened the door far enough, sarcastic comment about not being able to stay away from Grantaire’s pretty face on the tip of his tongue, Enjolras breezes past him, reusable cloth shopping bags in both his hands. He turns around standing by the half-wall separating Grantaire’s living space and his tiny kitchen, curls falling to rest on his forehead and framing his eyes. “Where should I put this?”

“Uh,” Grantaire clenches his hands next to his thighs, not knowing what else to do with them, searching for things to hold, to fumble with, to do _anything_ other than just stand around gaping. “Put what?”

“Your tea.” Enjolras lifts one of his arms, showing Grantaire one of the bags, maybe thinking he hadn’t noticed them yet. “And I got you some bread and jam, since I figured maybe you’d run out. If you haven’t, I’ll just take it home with me.”

Grantaire stares at the bags, slightly baffled by the current turn of events, by his luck, even though he was the one who asked for the tea. “No, that’s— I mean, that’s a lot of— I guess, the cabinets. They’re empty so you can put it wherever.”

Enjolras nods, nothing more than a tiny dip of his chin, and walks into his kitchen, resting the bags on Grantaire’s countertops, opening random cabinet doors. Enjolras is in his kitchen, and Grantaire’s brain short-circuits. Enjolras is in his kitchen, like he belongs there, organising his food and condiments and teas. He searches desperately for things to say, trying to break the silence between them while Enjolras stacks little carton boxes in the left cupboard above his head. “So, haven’t given up on me, then, Apollo?”

Enjolras opens the cabinet to the right of him, tutting and grabbing a cloth from the sink, a cloth that’s been resting, wet and gathering dust for months. He turns the faucet handle, and barely startles when the sound of rushing water is immediately accompanied by the pipes groaning and creaking. “What _is_ that?”

“What’s what? The noise? The pipes in this building are wicked old, so whenever there’s water going through them it sounds like cranky ghouls waking up. And if there’s spiders in my cupboards, just kindly leave them. They’ve been here likely as long as I have, and are letting me stay with a minor fuss.”  
_“Not_ the spiders, though if I find any, I’ll take them outside. _Or_ the pipes.” Enjolras finishes rinsing off the cloth to his satisfaction, squeezing water from it like it’s a conservative’s neck. _“_ _Apollo_. Why do you keep calling me that? ”

Grantaire grins at the back of Enjolras’ head while he determinedly wipes the top of his counter and the inside of his cabinets in places Grantaire had always been slightly too short to reach, even standing on the tips of his toes if he did feel like expending the effort. “It’s just a nice little nickname I thought of. Like it?”

“No.”

“Shame.”

Enjolras finds plates, once white but now slightly yellowed, that haven’t seen the light of day in at least a year, and opens his bag of tiger bread. Fresh, it looks like, though Grantaire can’t at first glance guess off which market. “Of course I haven’t given up. I asked Courfeyrac what tea you like, and he said he didn’t know, except you don’t like green, so I brought a lot of others instead. You have just about fifty mugs, and only three plates?”

“You asked Courfeyrac? People just _keep_ giving me mugs.” And then, with a look at the small mountain of tea boxes, “you didn’t have to empty out the entire store for me, you know.”

Enjolras turns around, the stale air in the apartment following him but not touching him, whereas Grantaire’s drenched in it. He thrusts a plate at Grantaire, a slice of bread with a thin, barely-there layer of jam. “I didn’t. Say thank you, Grantaire.”

Grantaire finally numbly takes it after Enjolras sighs and shoves it at him two more times. “Thank you?”

Enjolras sits down gingerly on the sofa, own plate on his knees, looking slightly uncomfortable and out of place. “I realised we didn’t decide on a time, but I was late today regardless. I wanted to pass through the Rue Mouffetard for the bread, so I had to wait for the stalls to open, and then I got held up by the crowds leaking out of the Saint-Médard.”

He should really have guessed Enjolras came from the students’ arrondissement, where he’d be perfectly at home and fit in with the old-world charm of the Latin Quarter. Grantaire knows it as a place full of prestigious universities and high schools, a place he was at one point apart of but never truly felt like he belonged in, no matter how long he tried pushing himself past the large packs of teenagers blocking its narrow streets.

He folds his bread until it won’t fold anymore, threatening to tear, and shoves it into his mouth with little regard for the look Enjolras gives him. He chews for less time than he probably should have, unwilling to leave any food at all in his mouth for longer than absolutely necessary, and almost chokes on it trying to swallow it down. He tries to not show it on his face, that he’s even incapable of keeping food down properly, something even toddlers are able to do. He pushes down the urge to vomit with both hands. “That’s fine. I was working.”

Enjolras’ eyes go wide, then searching as they roam around his room and eventually land on the large canvas underneath Grantaire’s single light bulb. They linger on Grantaire’s curtains, and then return to his own plate, where his sandwich sits half-eaten. “Ah! Did I interrupt?”   

“It’s fine,” Grantaire says, and finds he means it. He sets his plate down on his coffee table, shoving aside his empty, drained cell phone, papers and supplies so it can balance precariously on the edge of it. “I only just finished laying down the base colours, so.”

“Oh,” Enjolras says, chewing on a bite so very small it could’ve been made with a mouse’s dentures. “You do commission work?”

Grantaire laughs, first at the astonishment on Enjolras’ face, more expressions Grantaire is causing that look like they don’t belong on him, and then again when he looks briefly down and sees he’s already made stains in his new sweater. “Don’t sound so surprised, Apollo. I do make money once in a while.”

“I _know_. I mean, I figured you probably did in some way. Is, ah… Do you do it often? Commission work, not make money, though maybe they’re synonymous for you.”

“You really don’t have to pretend to be interested,” Grantaire tells him, not unkindly, or tries not to at the very least. He’s not sure he succeeds, but Enjolras’ jaw doesn’t clench, so he counts it a success.

“I’m not. Pretending, I mean.”

And maybe that’s true, Grantaire thinks. Maybe Enjolras is incapable of pretending to be sincere, or incapable of white lies for the benefit of someone’s feelings, or of telling a hopeless hermit looking like an ugly Gustave Courbet painting he doesn’t give a shit about art. Maybe he is, but for bigger causes than he. Grantaire relents, “I do commission work _sometimes_. I make more money drawing furries online than I ever will being commissioned to paint, a fact that drives me occasionally to despair.”

He watches the motions of Enjolras’ face, watches him visibly go from wondering what furries are, eye twitching, to deciding not to ask and likely google it himself as soon as he gets home, corners of his lips tightening, to thinking of a new question to ask. He decides on, “so what’s this new painting then?”

Grantaire follows his eyes to the canvas, a twenty-four by thirty-six inch that cost him more than he spends on groceries and rent in a month. “A nude.”

Enjolras sputters, and from the corner of his eye Grantaire can see him rapidly wiping his mouth, trying to make the jam on his chin disappear before Grantaire sees. “A what?”

“A nude. A naked person. I’ve gotten references and everything.”

“Of the naked person?”

Grantaire grins at him, unable to resist looking away for too long, eyes drawn to Enjolras like they’re attached to magnets and watching anything else while Enjolras is in the room is too much effort, too exhausting. “Not clothed, in any case. I have a great imagination, beyond compare perhaps, even, but they wanted this one true to life.”

“Well,” Enjolras says. “Well.”

“Well?”

Enjolras stuffs the rest of his sandwich into his mouth and folds his arms. “Well,” he mutters, words getting clearer and clearer the more he chews, “I won’t stop you from working on it, then. I can amuse myself, so don’t worry about me.”

“I’m not.”

“Then feel free.”

Grantaire, because he _does_ know what restraint is even though he usually refuses to practice it, doesn’t comment on how ludicrous it is to be given permission to work in his own home. Then again, he supposes commanding and delegating is Enjolras’ second nature, like being aggravating is his. He strides over to his canvas, picks up his palette with a hand he’s trying his hardest to keep steady, and takes in his other hand a brush smaller, more precise than the one he was working with before.

From the corner of his eye, he watches Enjolras rummage through his toppled stack of books still on the floor. It looks like he picks up a black book, not too thick, something he’d probably finish in a single day. Jean Paul Marat’s philosophical essay on man, Grantaire knows, doesn’t have to guess because he knows approximately where his books are even though he makes a mess of them.

For a little while, they sit in quiet. Grantaire doesn’t own a clock, but his brain provides the rhythmic ticking of one for him, his body working to the sound of an inaudible metronome. Then, Enjolras’ breathing goes unsteady, noticeable only in the silence, hitching like he’s trying to either not laugh or cry, and Grantaire allows himself a brief moment to imagine it might just be because of the countless annotations he’d littered that copy of the book with.

Grantaire purses his lips as he’s selecting from his paints a colour to make the shading on his nude’s thighs more interesting. “So, _Enjolras_ ,” he starts, unable to keep his mouth closed for too long, picking up two similar shades of blue to hold them up to his light bulb. “Aren’t there people on the left bank, a little closer to home, who need their lives saved? No elderly ladies to buy flowers for, or no old fools to play backgammon with?”

Enjolras flips the page of his book audibly, like it’s an annoying fly he needed to slap out of the way. “I don’t know how to play backgammon.”

“You seem smart, you’ll learn.” He selects the Prussian blue and dabs a tiny dollop of it in the middle of his other paints, near the white and cadmium red, trying to keep the price of his oils exactly in mind whenever he uses them (he fails at this a lot).

Below them, there’s the sounds of an opera drifting upwards. Grantaire has only seen the woman living there once, when he’d barely moved in and accidentally gotten some of her mail. She’d seemed a frail and dainty person, a little sickly but with a voice at the same time strict and kind, who wore clothing obscuring her frame almost entirely so it looked like she was just a little head floating atop a loose dress and multiple layers of pashmina. She also loves the Turandot. Any romantic Italian opera, but the Turandot first and foremost. She goes outdoors once a month, to see her grandchildren, and she gets her groceries through delivery. Grantaire feels like he knows her better than anyone. He dips his brush in his mug of linseed oil.

Enjolras turns another page. “I knew of the Amis Agency through friends, and I asked them for something they thought I’d be suitable for. They said you might be interesting, and I don’t look at distance much when it comes to things like these. I can do my required reading on the Met.”

“Interesting, am I?”

Below them, a crowd from a lonely woman’s record player calls for blood, _al sorger della luna, per man del boia, muoia._

“Mystifying, more like,” Enjolras answers, still not looking up from his book. Grantaire mixes a streak of grey-blue to shade his subject’s lower back. “So, did the curtains offend you personally?”

Ah. Grantaire sighs, dumping his brushes into his mug, a white novelty one reading _they say you can’t buy happiness, but you can buy a goat, and they’re pretty much the same thing_ Bossuet had bought him. He steps away from his canvas to avoid impulsively throwing something at it and tightly folds his arms against himself.

Another page. “No, no, please keep working, or it’ll defeat the purpose of you being distracted before asking about it at all.”

Grantaire doesn’t think he will. Grantaire thinks he’ll stand here until this is over and stare at the corner of his room, where the plaster’s cracked to look like a small winter forest. Enjolras makes a dissatisfied sound like Grantaire is a disobedient child, but when he speaks he doesn’t sound chastising, more intrigued, curious, which Grantaire finds he hates almost as much. “So why the curtains?”

“For the hilarity of it,” Grantaire replies, taking great pains to keep his voice light, but to his own ears it sounds still too strained.

“I don’t see the joke, I don’t think.”

“You wouldn’t.”

He hears Enjolras pick up a piece of paper, and put it in between his book before he closes it and puts it down next to himself. “It seems to me,” he says, quietly, pacifying, a voice he might use for a scared bristling animal, and Grantaire feels his hackles raise because, not in spite of it, “—like it’d be easier for you to paint with the natural lighting a window would provide.”

“Oh, it absolutely would be,” Grantaire says, through his teeth, finally turning around, hands firmly tucked into his armpits and fingers clenching restlessly. “I just thought it’d be hysterical to inconvenience myself immensely.”

There’s a brief silence. “This isn’t going how I wanted this to go,” Enjolras admits, hesitating, brow furrowed.

“How did you _expect_ it to go, Enjolras? What was I supposed to answer to your delicate line of questioning?” Grantaire wants to stalk into the kitchen and make tea, but his kettle broke down at some point several weeks ago, so he’s been using the same pot on his electric stove to boil his water and then ladle it into a mug. Standing next to a pot for tens of minutes isn’t what he feels like doing right now.

Enjolras still looks at him like he’s a puzzle to be solved, but he just hasn’t yet got got the tools. Grantaire hates how his stomach flutters at it, how his brain screams at him to make him look like that more because at least he’s getting any attention at all. “I’m just trying to help.”

“And I said I don’t need it.” Grantaire loses his own battle of wills and stalks to the kitchen, bending to take his trusty pot out of his bottom cabinet, and dumps it in the sink with a loud clatter. “I’m not going to be your Sunday Sudoku, Apollo. You can’t fill in some numbers and declare me done and solved and put me in the bin.”

“I didn’t think I could,” Enjolras says from somewhere closer to him. He must’ve gotten off the couch when Grantaire walked off, standing somewhere near the kitchen opening. “But surely you can’t think living like this is sustainable, or that you’ll be happy like this.”

Grantaire unsteadily shoves the pot of water onto the largest burner, sloshing a good part of it onto his stove, his pajama pants and the dirty linoleum. He click-click-clicks at the button meant to make the burner glow, but nothing happens. He keeps clicking it anyway. “I’ve made peace with never being happy in my life, Apollo. My personality directly opposes it. Some people weren’t meant to do good at life or be happy living it, clearly. _Clearly_.” He hears the stove make a humming sound and the burner successfully glows red. Grantaire forces his arms to lean on the counter-top, movements jerky and uncoordinated. “So stop trying. That’d be great.”

“I won’t.” Enjolras hesitates, wanting to enter the small kitchen space (bad idea, there really is barely enough space for only one person, much less for two,) but also wanting to give Grantaire space, and maybe he stays where he is also out of a little bit of self-preservation, not wanting to get punched. Crack his flawless marble, Grantaire’s mind supplies, lose his nose and join the collection of mutilated statue-faces in antiquity.

“Enjolras,” Grantaire mutters. “I don’t know what you want. You barely know me. There’s really no reason to be here when I don’t want you to be.” Liar, he’s a liar. And a really bad one too. Unconvincing and stupid, when all he wants to do is return the fire in Enjolras’ eyes so he can look at it and melt and drown at the same time.

Enjolras finally steps into the kitchen, hesitating most likely when realising how cramped the space is with two bodies occupying it, but soldiers on, reaching past Grantaire and into the top cabinet, blindly grabbing a box of tea. Mulled spice blend, Grantaire reads, and he wonders if Enjolras is a mind reader after all. Enjolras speaks softly when he does, only slightly louder than the bubbling of the water beginning to boil. “I don’t have to know you to want to be here.”

“I’m not going to get rid of you, am I?” Grantaire says, sounding defeated but every muscle in his body on high alert. He takes two mugs off the counter, arm brushing Enjolras’, heat radiating even through his thick sleeve.

He should clean them more often, he thinks, his mugs. Hot water takes a long time to get to him, or anyone in the flat, probably, thick sediment buildup in the water heater slowing it down, and he’s too impatient, so he uses cold water to wash his dishes exclusively. Maybe if he got to washing his mugs before the tea begins growing mold and the milk forms a crumbly edge on the inside, he’d do them more efficiently.

He washes one mug much more thoroughly than the other, barely a stain in it left.

Enjolras watches him put two single-use teabags in the mugs, and Grantaire absolutely refuses to look at his face. He doesn’t. He won’t, because he’s a person with some small dregs of self-respect and control. “I don’t think so, no,” Enjolras says, finally.

Enjolras doesn’t bring up the curtains after that. He spends the rest of the afternoon reading Marat, breath sometimes hesitating with astonishment or withheld laughter at Grantaire’s little penned in notes and comments barely legible in the page margins, curled up in the corner of the sofa, shifting often (it really is an incredibly uncomfortable sofa, and Grantaire should get some pillows for it. Or throw it out. Either, or.)

Grantaire burns his tongue drinking his cup of tea, and the cups following, far too quickly, and he paints, but not well. He manages to isolate the colours he wants to use for his shading, for detailing, ones that would best compliment the skin colour and mood, and thinks where to place them, how to layer them. When he tries, he does it clumsily, like his fingers aren’t his own, and like he’s never held a brush in his life. He’s too busy watching every single one of Enjolras’ movements on his sofa from the corner of his eye.

Despite this, their silence is more comfortable than before. Below them, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly plays, and Grantaire feels too much like he’s floating to focus on anything at all.

Grantaire doesn’t sleep. Not because anxiety keeps the stilts holding up his eyelids from snapping, but because he’s thinking. In the morning, he pries apart his curtains.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> once again, not beta-read by anyone but myself, which is beyond unreliable! thank you for your comments and kudos, and i'll see you next week! i'm on twitter at @ttjesje if anyone wants to chat!


	5. Next Tuesday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grantaire has friends. Some of them.

_ Next Tuesday.  _

He finishes the painting. The circles under his eyes are deeper than they have been in a very long time, and he’s spent more time painting than doing anything else he maybe ought to be doing more, like sleeping, but he finishes it and he’s satisfied. He stashes it on an easel near his bedroom door, where the air is cooler than in the rest of the apartment, and he suspects the insulation thinner, and where sometimes, during autumn storms, a breeze wafts in through the holes in the asbestos and plaster. 

He pulls his sweater over his head and pulls at the t-shirt underneath is, sticking to his skin despite the cold in his apartment. He may have forgotten to pay his gas bill, but he’s not very concerned about it currently. 

He  _ is  _ concerned about it when he remembers gas is also responsible for providing his hot water, standing in his bathroom in nothing but his boxers and waiting for his shower to be decent. It won’t ever be decent, because he absolutely, definitely forgot to pay his gas bill, which is probably still in his post box downstairs. He thanks his landlady for her smart investment into electric stoves (her first and last investment into the flat building), the first time he’s been able to thank her for anything during the entirety of his tenancy. 

He stares at the visible cold coming off the shower water, reluctantly peels off his boxers, clenches every muscle in his body in preparation, and jumps in. He shampoos himself so quickly and inefficiently he stabs himself in the eye and gets some in his nose, and when he thinks he’s washed it out of his hair enough, he quickly shuts off the tap. He stands shivering, watching the swirl of colours from the few paints he owns that will remove themselves with a good scrub and the remains of his shampoo, some buttermilk and almond shit Éponine had slipped into his grocery delivery after a particularly hard few weeks (he thinks more as a hint than as only a kindness,) wash down the drain. Paint still stains his skin in spots, but he wonders if he’ll ever rid of that completely.

He doesn’t immediately run naked to his bedroom to get dressed. Instead, like an idiot, Grantaire stands dripping in front of his foggy, slightly cracked bathroom mirror, pulling faces. He doesn’t look in mirrors or other reflective surfaces often, though lately more so, because he’s apparently more a masochist than anything. He doesn’t need the reminder of his own face staring back at him, but he takes it anyway. Of his nose, slightly crooked from having been broken once, twice, and too large for his face, the scar running down his thick eyebrow, or his uneven lips, his teeth, not sitting straight in his mouth, or the dark circles under his eyes currently standing out like bruises. 

He roughly towels at his hair, scrubs a shaking hand through it, not sure, never sure if it shakes due to the ever-present anxiety in his body or because he hasn’t had a drink since the afternoon yesterday. His curls spring back the way they were, wild, like he’d slept in a storm for a week, and he briefly, manically thinks he should just shave his entire head, before deciding he’d look worse bald. Lesgle, Bossuet, looks good with a bare head, not needing to hide his face with anything to be even remotely appealing from slightly farther away. They tease him, of course, but he looks fine, his face is handsome, his eyes shining and his smile happy and welcoming. Grantaire wouldn’t so much. He’d look like a potato with legs, like he’d been left in the bag too long and grown roots, maybe, a little bit, he decides after he’s pulled his hair back in two loose fists, and then lets then drop back down to his sides. Clothes. 

His teeth are chattering when he finishes his haphazard grooming ritual and walks into his bedroom, still disheveled and still a mess from his latest hazy day. His wardrobe consists of a small box next to his mattress he can’t contain most of his shirts in, which he doesn’t need to since over half the time they’re strewn about his apartment. He sniffs suspiciously at a steel blue t-shirt lying close enough to the box to possibly once have been in it, and he decides it’s going to have to be good enough. He finds a hoodie that smells more of turpentine than sweat, so it passes his test with flying colours. It’s soft from having been through the washing machine so often, slightly worn, and when he pulls it on, a little looser on him than he remembers it being. Jeans he doesn’t worry about smelling, grabbing any random pair he manages to see through the darkness. It’s so cold in his apartment his skin feels tight with it, so he does the first thing he can think of, drags his blanket to his armchair and curls up in it. 

Grantaire owns a radio, somewhere. He used to like listening to the eighties and nineties nostalgia channels, and the top forties, and the poppy, sappy tunes Chérie FM had to offer. It maybe is somewhere in his bedroom, or maybe he shoved it in a cabinet, or maybe under a stack of papers. The poor thing is out of batteries in any case, and his body is spending too much energy keeping him warm to leave any for him to look for it. So, instead, he absently hums Femme Libérée and debates on whether grabbing his laptop to let his commissioner know his painting is drying can wait another day, or maybe two. He decides it can. 

Maybe, soon, sometime, he should gather up all his clothes in a large, black garbage bag and a handful of change and beg and grovel till one of his friends agrees to take it with them to the self-service laundry when they go to wash their own things, face trying not to burn with humiliation. Eventually, his brain tells him, eventually they will tell you to go fuck yourself instead of accepting the boxer shorts you’ve worn for six days (three days, then turned inside out, then another three days, because he reasoned that was as good as them being clean). They won’t put up with it forever. Yes, Grantaire tells his brain in return, so I wait until that moment comes, but that doesn’t mean that I have to do it with sweat stains in my jumpers. 

After about an hour, in which some parts of him, the insides of his arms, and his stomach, the parts not exposed to the air but pressed into each other, have warmed up enough for him to stop shivering, he decides to find socks and make tea. He finds two pairs, one with ducks, stolen from Joly, and one with an off-model Batman, Christmas, Courfeyrac, and layers them, clenching and curling his toes as he walks to the kitchen to get blood flowing back into them. 

He’s filled a pot with enough water to last him maybe through the day, when his door slams open. The pot drops to the floor when he tries to whirl around, forgetting he’s still holding it, cursing himself for never getting a lock, the pot crushing his toes  _ just  _ a little bit.

His wide-eyed panic changes to relief, then slight, unsettled anxiety at having his plans of spending his day doing nothing by himself meddled with, mingled with real, unfiltered happiness, seeing his friends in the door opening. Joly is wide-eyed, searching, fingers white-knuckled around the top of his cane. His scarf is still layered around his neck to protect him from the cold weather, hat firmly pressed over his short, shaggy hair and his ears, and he looks like he’s about to choke to death before he sees Grantaire standing in the kitchen, lifting one leg like a flamingo bird, and visibly calms. Behind him is Bossuet, calmer, steadying, smile permanently plastered on his face along with his laughter lines, one hand on Joly’s shoulder as though to restrain him from tearing the door from its hinges entirely. His knees are both a little wet and dirt-stained, like he’s slipped and fallen more than once on the way over.   

Joly gapes at him, then stalks over to the half-wall separating him and Grantaire and points at him. “You,” he says accusingly, his breath wafting out of him in a small, visible cloud, dissipating between them.

“Me,” Grantaire says, cradling his left foot tenderly in his hand. 

“You,” Joly continues, “have not been answering your phone.” 

Ah. He remembers with sudden clarity the last time he’d answered a phone call, before the Enjolras  _ thing, _ and how he hadn’t charged his phone since. How it’s been sitting on his table to be a coaster for his drinks. “Oh,” he says, trying to shove as much guilt into one syllable as possible. “I forgot to charge it.” 

“You forgot to _ — _ that makes perfect sense actually, but please don’t.” 

Grantaire puts his foot down gingerly, his toes still throbbing, and steps his socks out of the cold, wet puddle of water with a wince. He abandons the idea of making tea until he’s more willing to deal with the mess and steps over the puddle, out of the kitchen and into his small living space, his socks squelching on his feet. “What, miss me?” 

“You know we do, R,” Joly says, achingly serious in the face of Grantaire’s attempt at joviality. “We figured you hadn’t died at least until Sunday, or Enjolras would have let us know. A lot can happen in two days, though.” 

Bossuet walks in and closes the door behind him, almost immediately tripping over a book and the empty air surrounding it, his limbs, slightly too long for his body, flailing like he doesn’t know what to do with them. He rights himself, flashes Grantaire a large, winning smile and holds up a plastic Aldi bag. “We brought games in case you were still alive.” 

“Yes, Monopoly and Trictrac, and the one with the geese,” Joly adds. “Just in case.” 

Grantaire fiercely loves his friends. Sometimes he doesn’t; not because of anger or arguments, or because of hurt, but because, isolated and sometimes completely overcome with something he doesn’t have words for, it’s occasionally a little too easy to forget about everything outside of his own bubble of misery. Misery so all-encompassing there’s no space or place for things that bring him joy. He grins. “I may have a few euros to squander in a bet-based game of Goose, if you’re not too chicken.” 

“Never,” Bossuet declares, already hopping over the back of the sofa, loudly hitting his knee on the edge of it and tumbling down on it with a thud and a muffled squeak. His words are suddenly strangled and muffled. “How many euros are we talking?” 

Grantaire tries to think of the contents of his wallet, and the last time he’d opened it, purses his lips and lands on a very confident, “four. And fifty cents.” 

“Perfect! That’ll buy us either one burger or two small fries, or just one really nice coffee.” 

Joly sits down gingerly next to Bossuet, on the very edge of his seat. Bossuet really is the only person he knows who doesn’t complain about the springs poking through the cushions when he sits, which Grantaire takes to mean his standards for seating are as low as his, because God took a hot steaming dump on his life and Bossuet decided to work with it best he could. Joly moves to take his scarf off, and then realises cold air is still hitting his hands with a vengeance, despite not being outside anymore. “R,” he begins, carefully. 

Grantaire drops down on his trusty armchair. It sighs with the constant abuse. “Yes?” 

“Are you trying to freeze yourself to death? Is this an art project medical science students just don’t understand?” 

Grantaire helps Bossuet set up the game board, and old cardboard thing half torn through the middle, which seems to be normal for Game of the Goose boards. It seems Wizard of Oz themed, but the images are so faded it could be Alice in Wonderland instead. He claims to help set-up, but really all he does is take the green goose before anyone else can. “Don’t you like it? It has a walk-in freezer kind of charm.” 

“R—” 

“I’ll fix it,” he quickly interrupts his friend, before all worries of pneumonia or hypothermia come out in one long breath. “It’ll be fine. What colour do you want to be, Jolllllly?” 

Joly sighs, not wanting to drop the conversation, but wanting to keep the peace. “Yellow.” 

(Joly and Bossuet are bad at this game, and worse at jokes. “It seems I’ve counted my geese before my eggs hatched,” Bossuet mutters. “Your geese might be cooked, my dearest,” sighs Joly. “I should have goose’d up,” Bossuet says mournfully. “You killed your goose that lays the golden eggs,” Grantaire volunteers, and gets smirks in response.) 

Grantaire, despite landing on the death square twice, wins three euros.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just in time once again! not beta-read once more as is custom here in my part of town, and somewhat of a filler chapter again. thank you for all the comments and kudos!


	6. Some following Wednesday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They play backgammon, Grantaire matches Power Rangers to the amis and argues in favour of love.

_Some following Wednesday._

“He claims to be in _love!”_ Enjolras spits the word like it’s olives. Apparently, Grantaire has found out, Enjolras hates olives. Enjolras wildly waves his hands, slightly obscured by the long sleeves of the coat he’s still wearing. Grantaire still hasn’t paid his bill. “ _Love!_ He doesn’t even know her _name.”_

“Ah, young love,” Grantaire says, and pretends to swoon, hand to his forehead. “At first sight, no less. It’s like Mme. Brodeur’s operas, her sweltering Italian romances. Like a fairytale, teenagers meeting by a balcony or forbidden in a forest.”  

Enjolras glares at him, then rolls two dice and waits for Grantaire to do the same. “It’s _ridiculous_ ; he was too busy telling tales of her beautiful blonde hair and her _devastatingly blue eyes_ to collect the flyers from the printing service, and Combeferre had to drive out.”

Another thing he’s found out about Enjolras, is he leads a small, as of yet unnamed group of social activists, including some of _his_ friends, that gather in some small café, the Musain, where he holds speeches and they fight crime, like social justice Power Rangers. Enjolras is, of course, the Red Ranger, but less interested in sports and scuba diving. In this case, he’d be red for courage, for valour, hardiness, revolution, and, sometimes, the blood shed for them. He hasn’t decided who Marius is yet. Combeferre is probably Billy Cranston in this scenario, though he doesn’t really know him well enough to judge. It’s a gut feeling.

Blonde hair and devastatingly blue eyes.

Grantaire decides he likes Marius.

“The girl dumped coffee on him, for God’s sake, and lent him her scarf to hide the stain. One scarf, apparently a symbol of eternal affection and a wild goose chase. How is he thinking he can find her again with all the girls in Paris and _one_ scarf?”

“He’s foolish,” Grantaire agrees, as he also rolls his dice. “But so are all the ways of the heart. It makes fools of us all. Surely, you’ve had your share of admirers, with your looks the likes have last been described in classical antiquity? Ones who looked at you with shiny, wide eyes and shining faces, like Marius fawning over this mystery lady?”

“No,” Enjolras says, immediately, shortly. “Not that I’ve noticed, in any case.”

“You might be too blinded by all the injustice of France to notice the doe-eyes,” Grantaire suggests. He’s teaching Enjolras backgammon on the trictrac board Bossuet and Joly left behind, but he’s forgotten just _some_ of the rules. He’s improvising, but it’s not like Enjolras would know, so he feels free to bend the rules, sometimes to his own benefit. “Five-five! That means I rule, and you suck, legally. Oh, but that might be an illegal move.” Grantaire frowns when he thinks of how to move so his checkers aren’t completely stuck. “I win if my checkers make something that looks a little bit like a hand flipping the bird.”

“Is that original Middle Eastern rules?” Enjolras raises his brow, moving his own pieces by four, and then by two. Grantaire is too distracted by the sharp arch of it to notice anything else, much less the game board. “I’m not _blinded,_ just, I think preoccupied. I don’t have time for things like a romantic partner, or silly dates, or getting coffee spilt on me and then running all around Paris trying to find a girl smelling of, what was it, _daisies and rainwater?”_

“Of course not, you’re married to France, to Mlle. _Liberté.”_ Grantaire smirks, turning his dice over in his palm and blowing on them for luck. “But love doesn’t work like that, Apollo. Love never comes when it’s convenient, or when you want or need it to, or when you have time for it. It comes especially when you don’t, and doesn’t wait for you to be able to catch up. _Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove._ It’s meant to strike you like a blow, or come crashing upon you very slowly, like lazing on your back in an ocean and waves lapping at your jaw, then your cheeks, and slowly and steadily higher until you’re submerged. It doesn’t ask permission first. _It is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken_.”

“Love sounds like an inconvenience,” Enjolras asserts, frowning. He looks young, always, because he is, but when he frowns like this, confused instead of full of righteous fury, even more so. Grantaire and Enjolras must be close to the same age, but Grantaire looks like he’s lived for forty years and been excruciatingly awake for all of them, and Enjolras like he’s stopped ageing when God, if in Heaven, decided he looked just enough like an angel to represent His courts, though Grantaire won’t say it out loud. Thoughts like these, he keeps private, too genuine and lacking in either humour or barb to ever leave the recesses of his brain. “It’s feelings I don’t have room for, and very likely won’t ever feel. I’m not a child, running around collecting flowers or putting sand down a classmate’s shirt so they’ll pay attention to me.”

Grantaire grits his teeth, suddenly feeling like he’s got a mouthful of grit and mud, because he’s the child in kindergarten, in the sandbox with the handful of it down Enjolras shirt. Except Enjolras isn’t a three-year-old, he’s an adult student with foolish dreams bigger than himself, much bigger than Grantaire. Enjolras is a student trying to work himself through law school as well as get himself established in local politics, wants to get elected to the Conseil général when Grantaire dropped out of _art school_. Grantaire is a toddler throwing sand at the eyes of an adult, but he’s a toddler who knows what depression and taxes are. His jaw hurts.

He tries to force levity. “To have found the only thing in which you’re as much of a non-believer as I am in the goodness of man.”

“I just don’t fancy myself a romantic. It’d be useless for me to be.”

And Grantaire loses his struggle with his own temper. “Ah, of course, because whereas even the great and cruel god Apollo wasn’t above love, mourned when he lost it, fed his lover’s body ambrosia and refused to let Hades claim his soul, instead created a beautiful flower, _you’re_ too good for all that childish fancy.”

“Not too good,” Enjolras says, throwing his dice. Three-one. “Too busy with things that matter.”

Grantaire’s fist is clenched tightly around his own dice, feeling the slightly rounded corners of them press into the bones of his palm. “Do you feel this way when it comes to Joly and Bossuet? Do you think of this when Courfeyrac talks of love? I know he _does_ , I know how he feels about it, how he loves freely and feels for everyone. Do you think he’s playing a pathetic child’s game?”

“Sometimes,” Enjolras says. “It’s fine as long as it doesn’t impede his work or his focus. He doesn’t drop all he’s working on or think the world’s stopped turning every time he has a _crise de coeur_. He knows the things that matter and the things that matter less, or don’t at all. I’m not a dictator, you know. I won’t tell people they can’t have _fun.”_

“But _love_ is too all-encompassing, too intrusive,” Grantaire finishes, his veins cold. He shouldn’t be like this, his brain tells him vaguely. It doesn’t matter. None of this matters. He doesn’t know why he’s angry and he should keep his cool and keep the peace. But instead, at the forefront of his mind, trampling the side of his brain hissing at him to stay quiet, he thinks of Joly and Bossuet, who are so disgustingly in love they don’t have to ask what the other wants to order at any given restaurant because they know. He thinks of Éponine, believing she’ll never have it, like him but for slightly varying reasons.

He thinks of Jean Prouvaire, who speaks of love like it’s a precious, tender thing, like it’s all he ever wants in life and that if or when he finds it, he’ll truly know what it’s like to float and fly at the same time. Jehan who writes Courfeyrac notes with his coffee, and who told Courfeyrac he’d lost the beanie Courfeyrac had lent him, ears burning, because he didn’t lose it, he just didn’t want to return it. He thinks of himself, but very, very briefly, and immediately feels like he’s at the edge of a cliffside, about to topple over.

Before, he’d asked Enjolras if Joly or Bossuet, or mostly Courfeyrac truly had never mentioned his name before, because Courfeyrac speaks of all his friends, though apparently also didn’t think to mention the little group he went protesting with last spring had a golden, fearless leader made of marble, and just as cold. He’d asked if Enjolras had truly gone into this buddy arrangement blind, if he’d never even heard Coufeyrac’s vague mention of Grantaire. In anecdotes, as a friend. (“He may very well have. I don’t particularly pay attention to specifically the people Courfeyrac speaks of. There’s many.”)

With that conversation fresh in his mind, with the matter-of-fact tone, not trying to seem callous or cold-hearted, but being so nonetheless, with the unreasonable hurt Grantaire felt at not being remarkable enough to peak Enjolras’ interest when mentioned in conversation, with that hurt coursing through him like fire, he feels himself shove at the game board, most of them falling to the floor and scattering amongst the papers littering the parquet flooring.

“Love,” he continues. “Love is so far below you, of course, you can’t possibly imagine how some people live and die for it. They’re all idiots to you, and yet you think _I’m_ cruel for thinking the world won’t ever change, that people are inherently incapable of it, or are inherently too self-absorbed.”

“It’s not that I don’t _believe_ in love,” Enjolras interrupts him, defensive and surprised like he didn’t realise their conversation was taking a nose-dive. He’s not paying any attention to the game board anymore, dropping the dice and letting them roll to the dark places in Grantaire’s apartment where no one ever looks and they’ll never be discovered. “I love my friends, I love many things, despite what people think. Romance, though— well, I _do_ see it. I _do_ believe in it. It’s just—”

“No,” Grantaire continues. “No, I bet you do. You just think it’s a waste of passion. That people ought to be doing something else with it. Wasted unless spent on what you find important.”

“Why do you feel so strongly about this,” Enjolras asks, clenching his fingers into the folds of his jeans, voice slightly raised to match his own. “Why do you care what I feel for, and what I don’t? Or that I don’t understand the matters of the heart and I don’t care to?”

“Call me a foolish romantic,” Grantaire sneers.

“Well.” Enjolras is still frowning, and Grantaire slowly, slowly feels the anger seeping out through his pores and dissipating in the cold air like their visible breaths. “I’m sure Marius won’t pay any heed to my scoffing and groaning at his puppy love. I don’t expect him to stop just because I don’t agree, and perhaps one day I’ll be proven wrong in my views.”

Grantaire feels even more like a child throwing a needless tantrum because he was forbidden to eat candy before dinner. Stupid, and a little cold, though nothing to do with the frost permeating the air outside and inside his rooms. “Maybe.”  

Enjolras begins picking up their checkers without any fuss, like he’s used to Grantaire’s moods. He hasn’t seen the worst of them or the most of them. Grantaire, after years of living with them, still feels ashamed. Enjolras begins arranging their pieces, clearly not fully remembering how far they’d moved them. “I’d figured, with your staunch declarations of believing the world is doomed, or of the people being inherently either suffering or corrupt, you wouldn’t believe in things like love.”

“I don’t,” Grantaire mutters, looking for more dice, or maybe the ones they’d had before. “Or I do. I believe in love and romance and liberty and justice, though I believe humanity is too cruel to accomplish much of it in this or any lifetime. But there are exceptions to everything, isn’t there?”

“I suppose there are.”

Enjolras falls silent, looking at him. Grantaire stares back, watching as slowly Enjolras’ lips curl into a smirk. Grantaire frowns. “What?”

Enjolras doesn’t say anything, just huffs a soft laugh between them. Grantaire watches his breath form a small, white puff of smoke in the air and then looks down.  
On the board, Enjolras has arranged his own checkers pieces to resemble something suspiciously looking like a hand, middle finger outstretched.

Grantaire tips over the cliff’s edge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this ones a little late BUT its for the reason that im moving apartments! thank you again for your comments and kudos!


	7. Some other Wednesday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grantaire is adrift.

_Some other Wednesday._

It must be at least the very start of December, because the streets outside his windows gain more and more lights and more and more topiaries, windows covered in paper trees and synthetic snow, wreaths and stars made of all sorts of materials. He still, for some reason he doesn’t want to acknowledge, doesn’t pay his gas bill, but he manages to placate Joly with promises of warm sweaters, blankets and warm water bottles.

A week after finishing it, his commission is touch-dry, and he’s rewarded with a very happy man and his very happy wife, too rich and naive to realise his prices are just at the edge of too high, but most importantly, he’s rewarded with a nice payment deposited in his bank, available in one to two business days. Bahorel brings him two bottles of red wine, ‘for the Holidays’, and, after sending the lion’s share of his payment to his landlady with a little note of two x’s, he orders mulling spices and a large bag of cheap apples. After some minor internal debate, he buys a calendar.

Grantaire paints, and once in a while plays cards with Bahorel, or Gavroche, when Éponine has the time in between one of her three jobs to drop him off before leaving for another. Enjolras still stops by every Wednesday and Sunday, sometimes with bread and condiments, sometimes with news articles he’s read in the metro on the way to Grantaire’s corner of Paris, sometimes with dinner, when he knows he’s running late. Grantaire tries desperately to remind himself it means nothing but Enjolras being good at this, that he’d do the same for any pathetic, lonely soul, that he’s a charity case. It only works most of the time.

Grantaire keeps asking after the Power Ranger meetings. Enjolras, at some point, starts bringing their meeting notes to his appointments with Grantaire, and then goes through them. He sometimes leaves room for Grantaire to interject with his own comments, most of them scathing cynicism, a lot bordering on fatalism, and few crossing the border into nihilism.

Grantaire would scoff at all of Enjolras’ statements, and throw his own beliefs at him, citing sources verbally like he’d memorised them (he had), citing Proust and Maupassant, and articles and internet experiments all in the same couple sentences. Once in a while, Enjolras would glower at him, uncap his pen and scribble something on the papers in front of him, and once in a while he’d laugh, disbelieving and frowning.

“You’re ridiculous,” Enjolras would say. “You were arguing the opposite of that just five sentences ago,” and they’d start all over.

Enjolras talks to him of protests, of his arrest record (“All misunderstandings, of course.”) and of leading a protest across campus that had led to him chaining himself to the fence gate and having to have his chains sawn through, despite his protestations. Grantaire, before this, didn’t think at all about how people like Enjolras existed in real life. About the people who organise and lead the rallies and demonstrations, and about how the passion of those people is so genuine and alight Grantaire worries he might go blind from it. He learns Enjolras had a dog when he was younger, a Golden Retriever, and that he hadn’t had one since because it couldn’t possibly hold a candle to his first. He learns many things, all of which he remembers for no reason other than he can and he wants to. Enjolras talks to his mirror more than he does other people, proselytising reflective glass, and sometimes ducks when he visits the park pond, and Enjolras has no siblings (of course he doesn’t.)

It’d become a nice routine, one he almost allowed himself to enjoy, or get lost in. He likes hearing about Marius, and likes hearing Enjolras reluctantly admit he likes Cosette, who is apparently a photographer, after Marius’ wild goose chase for the girl attached to the scarf ended in a book shop and with shyly exchanged telephone numbers. Enjolras calls her strong-willed and not too shy to tell them how she feels, or when she wants to help.

He likes hearing Enjolras complain about politicians he hates, how some of them will vote against whatever the progressive party wants, without argument or reason, or how some of them are swayed by something as easy as a bouquet of flowers at their desk. Thénardier takes favours on the side, and no he doesn’t have evidence of it, but he will, and only Mme. Lamarque replies to his letters, but the rest will follow.

He likes hearing of his friends. Enjolras talks about all his friends fondly, and some of them are Grantaire’s too, and he loves the way Enjolras says their names, and how he seems fond when describing the things they do, his eyebrows relaxed and his forehead smooth. He tells Grantaire of how Courfeyrac got so heated in the face of an argument he nearly punched a bar patron, and how Joly had merrily swindled a rowdy and rude English tourist at a card game he’d made up on the spot, or how Bossuet almost got kicked out of the bar for dropping six glasses in rapid succession.

Grantaire almost even likes the scorn or disappointment in Enjolras’ gaze and words when Grantaire interrupts him to tell him that what he wants of the world, the world will never give him.

They don’t talk anymore about Grantaire, or try not to. Grantaire manages to handily side-step any comment about his drapes, or collecting his mail from the slot downstairs, and Enjolras somehow manages to refrain from making their arguments _personal,_ monumental effort as it must take. The boat remains un-rocked, or at most slightly swaying. It’s easy, a sort of wobbly comfortable, where Enjolras isn’t attempting to gather and impress and rally a gathering of people, and Grantaire isn’t attempting to steal any attention away.

Grantaire isn’t sure why Enjolras still shows. He still hasn’t given him much reason to, though their conversations have grown less barbed. Grantaire hasn’t given him reason to buy him tea, or had many kind and forgiving conversations about nice things like the weather or music. They’ve spoken of art (Enjolras doesn’t understand it, but may be willing to concede it has political merit,) and of philosophy and law, but have never once come to an agreement on any of them. He hasn’t taken any of Enjolras’ well-meant but too sharply delivered advices about his seclusion, his drinking or his eating habits, and surely, it would be in his best interest to give up. It nags at his brain that he’s a hopeless cause, and that those are perhaps Enjolras’ favourite things in the world.

He likes listening to the news from Enjolras more than anything, more than reading it himself, and slowly, with his heart hammering and his arms trembling, Grantaire throws out his several year-old newspapers.

Sometimes Enjolras will say, “why do you care?” when Grantaire asks if their protest went well, or if Combeferre found the book he told Enjolras to recommend. “Why do you keep asking if you don’t believe in any of it anyway? If you think we’re just a bunch of stupid tiny people with beliefs?” There’ll always be bitterness in Enjolras’ voice, but not the tendrils of an argument, just a question, and it’s one Grantaire can’t really answer. Not out loud, and only occasionally to himself. Really, he just likes feeling he could’ve been _there_. That he’s sitting in the corner of the room as an onlooker, nursing his wine and once in a while shouting something across the room. Like he’s a fringe-part of their group, like he can sit there and watch their fearless leader and think of how good he looks in lights brighter than the ones he has at home. The other part is he likes listening to Enjolras talk. When Enjolras talks, Grantaire thinks maybe, just maybe, it’ll be alright to fall in love with him.

Enjolras doesn't like it when he drinks. Or, he didn’t mind at first until he realised the empty bottles in Grantaire’s room weren’t built up over years, but more a shockingly small amount of months. “Your liver must hate you,” he said, eyebrows furrowed in, most likely, disdain, disapproval, disgust, as Grantaire opened some cheap stuff Bahorel brought him, some fruity but strong drink he didn’t usually prefer.

Grantaire usually drinks straight from the neck of the bottle, and doesn’t usually share, so he doesn’t now, even on the very off chance Enjolras had wanted him to. “My liver and I,” he’d said, “we have a complicated yet comfortable relationship, where I keep it content with a balm of spirits, and I in the meantime get to replace its healthy tissues with dead ones.”

Before he’s really and well realised it, he mostly thinks of Enjolras.

Everything is nice for a little while. Almost normal, if not for how Grantaire’s brain keeps knocking at the door of his consciousness, telling him things can’t stay this way. Something will give. One of them will say something thoughtless and this incredibly fragile balance will topple like an unstable jenga tower. That he’s not on the edge of the cliffside anymore. That instead, he's out at sea, on a raft or maybe a really shitty boat, and he's headed for the side of the cliffs instead. Slowly, but absolutely, waves propelling him towards them faster sometimes and slower other times. He knows he'll crash. He just doesn't know when.

Today, Enjolras is so animated he’s stood up and is pacing the small space from his window to the sofa and back, steps as certain as his words. Enjolras speaks as if he believes every single word he says, always, and fully. Like every word he says means something important, like it’s weighed and measured and none of them are wasted. Grantaire is drunk on the idea Enjolras’ words are being used for _him._

“People are better off dead,” Grantaire says, without any heat or outwardly shown misery, but with a lot of drama, holding a cigarette in the same hand as he holds his beer can. “Life, why would anyone want to improve it? It’s better to get it over with, isn’t it, like a plaster, or a trip to the dentist. We’re all born to die, and I wonder often if life holds any worth at all. When we’re born, we’re hovering above the grave, being lowered slowly further down every single day. What’s the point?”

Enjolras’ face is a picture, an image Grantaire wants to paint desperately. He tries to remember the frowns, the wrinkle in his nose, the tilt of his eyebrows and his lips, frozen like he watched a man step out of a quattrocento painting, halo shining golden, but then Enjolras turns around again, marching toward his window.

“Life is an exercise in futility,” Grantaire continues. “It's a cliff we're all slowly nearing and falling off of, or crashing into. The titanic hitting the iceberg. We seek meaning where there isn't any, and every moment you are awake, life tries to show us how useless everything is. Futile.”  

Enjolras argues with him until he’s in danger of missing his last bus home, and he looks radiant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for keeping up with this !! next chapter is very incredibly short so ill try to get it up asap!


	8. Thursday

_ Thursday.  _

“Éponine, it’s not funny.” 

Over the phone, he hears her sip at something, long and loud, and smack her lips. She’s probably at her shift at the bar, enjoying one of her few free drinks that come with the job. “It’s hilarious, actually. The first guy I send your way who comes back more than once, who isn’t scared off by your attempts to be a human-repellant shield, and you fall  _ in love  _ with him.” 

Grantaire groans. “Find him another job. Tell him I’ve died.” 

Éponine laughs, and hangs up. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one is supremely short so im throwing it in quickly after the last one! thank you for your continued comments !!


	9. Saturday.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jehan Prouvaire pays a visit.

_Saturday._

Grantaire feels restless. Like he needs to run through a glass window, like in the movies, or through a brick wall. Crush a glass in nothing but his one hand, punch a villain, _hey you, get your damn hands off her-_ someone. What he _really_ needs to do is look at his email to see if anyone needs any oil or aquarelle paintings done, or, perhaps needs a marker portrait of an anthropomorphised dog. Maybe fucking an anthropomorphised horse, depending on what website they hit him up from. What he does instead is sit on his kitchen floor while he waits for his wine to heat up on the slow electrical burner.

He takes a large bite out of one of the apples, his brain briefly telling him he needs to spit it out, that there’s worms in there, that they’re crawling down his throat. He shrugs. Worms aren’t going to be the worst thing he’s ever had, probably, maybe.

In the afternoon, while he’s ladling warm, spicy wine into a vaguely clean mug (in several different fonts, _I might not be too good at advice, but can I interest you in a sarcastic comment,_ a present from Courfeyrac), Jehan walks into his apartment carrying a large stack of books and a small, blue water pistol. He has, gathered in his hairs, small, tiny wet drops that reflect a little of the light Grantaire has on, maybe snow that’d melted, or, more likely, a late autumn rainfall, and on his technicolor casual jacket a small name tag, _hello my name is:_ _Jehan_ , _from: nowhere important._

“R, my friend,” he says, placing his tall stack of books on Grantaire’s counter, taking off his scarf and winding it around Grantaire’s neck. It smells like a sweet perfume and fruit. “I saw the most stunning thing on the way here.”

“Oh?” Grantaire cleans another mug (a mint leaf, _Mint Your Own Business_ in looping script, gift from Joly), and ladles more wine. He cuts up extra apple slices, because Jehan really likes the apple slices. “What did you see?”

Jehan hops up on the counter, narrowly avoiding tipping the books over with the grace of a dancer. He takes the hair tie out of his braid and unwinds it, combing long fingers through to get out the small knots. “Snow,” he says. “A little bit, not enough to cover the ground but enough to touch the bushes. Soon only the evergreens will still be alive, but the many string lights should make up for the lack of flowers, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Grantaire mumbles through Jehan’s scarf looped around his neck once, twice, thrice. He fishes an apple slice from his wine and pops it into his mouth, sucking on it a little bit before chewing. Not that it snowed too much before Grantaire decided the hermit life was more for him than any other one he could have lived incorporating the outdoors, and not that he went on _too_ many scenic walks during the winters then either, the Holidays an exception.  

Jehan begins braiding his hair back out of his face with one hand, blowing on his wine to let it cool down a little. “Perhaps next year is the year you will,” he says, smiling, swinging his legs gently.

“Might just be.” Grantaire sinks down, back against the doors of his counters, heels as close to his butt as possible, knees close enough he could lean his chin on them. “What’ve you got for me this time, Prouvaire?”

First and foremost, Jehan wants to water the small cactus he once gave Grantaire so he’d have something else alive in his flat to look at. Most of the time, due to Grantaire’s chronic negligence, it isn’t very alive at all. Jehan tuts at him from near his windowsill and squirts the water pistol a couple times, most of the water used to soak the soil, some of it landing on the low, messy spiral of tendrils growing slowly down the side of the pot. Because of the very minimal amount of sunlight and its irregular watering schedule, it hasn’t flowered since Grantaire got it, and its growth is very stunted. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, probably.

“I brought you Yeats, Wild Swans at Coole,” Jehan says after inspecting the plant and deciding he doesn’t need to repossess it _just_ yet. “ _I balanced all, brought all to mind, the years to come seemed waste of breath._ Shelley, Dylan Thomas, too, and Virginia Woolf. Three of Virginia Woolf, actually. You liked her last time.”

Grantaire did. He’d opened the book and hadn’t put it down for the next eight hours, ignoring his body’s screams for food or a bathroom break. He gulps down the last dregs of his mulled wine and set his mug down on the floor next to him, pulling Jehan’s scarf back to cover his lower lip. He supposes when you’re stuck within your own mind as well as your home, it’s necessary to care about at least one thing, and of all things, books stolen for him from the university library are amongst the most sane of them.

Eventually, Jehan sits next to him on the frosty linoleum, ignoring the slight stickiness of Grantaire’s floor. Jean Prouvaire smiles like nothing in the world is a secret to him, but instead of being unnerving, it’s reassuring. Like Grantaire doesn’t have to explain anything, like he can just say things and Jehan will know what he means. Jehan, neither rich nor binary, who thinks orchids look sad, and who is too good for anything on this earth to be able to deserve him in its lifetime.

Jehan leans his leg into the side of Grantaire’s thigh. “So, R,” he begins, reaching up with both hands to try and blindly get the pot of mulled wine down from the stove. Grantaire isn’t very worried about this, though maybe he should be. “Any news you’d like to share? Overheard any interesting conversations from your vantage point over the street? Any volunteers you’d like to tell me about that piqued your hard-won interest?”

Grantaire leans his face away from him, smiling, wry and small. “Always, Jehan.”

“Well, out with it, R. You know I have all day, but it seems like there’s a lot to discuss.”

“Oh, well,” Grantaire loosens his arms where they’re wrapped around his knees so he can gesture with them. “Into my life walks a man as gorgeous as the sun, and I have no choice but to orbit him. I am the dirt under his shoe. An atom in the air around him. He is like a man walked down from the mountain Olympus, just to look down at the common rabble and say: “what common folk, I’ll mingle with them. I’ll pick one specific, pathetic individual and turn his life around on its axis.” _He walks in beauty, like the night, of cloudless climes and starry skies._ The gods play with us like children torturing worms with sticks, Jehan. They do. And yet, I sit here and wonder, _why was I not crush’d, such a pitiful germ? O Delphic Apollo._ _”_

Jehan snorts and finally manages to get the hot wine down to their level with no sloshing whatsoever, balancing it on his knees. “He did tell Éponine you keep calling him that,” Jehan says, ladling more wine into their mugs and stealing most of the apple slices for himself. “Like was the case with most, if not all your volunteers, his first day was truly eye-opening.”

“And here I was on my best behaviour as well.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to be any other way, of course.”

Grantaire sighs, deeply, as though to push the air through every single one of his extremities. “Nothing good comes of mortals falling in love with gods. Next I know, I’ll be like Cassandra, as truthful yet as often mistrusted.”

“No man is a god, R,” Jehan says, gently, handing him his mug, filled to the brim. “Neither is Enjolras, you know. You’ve found a way of deifying him, but he’s just a man, and he’s under thirty so he’s, by law, a dumbass like the rest of us. He’s just a guy, despite his…” He waves his free hand at his own face and hair.

“Angelic appearance,” Grantaire supplies helpfully, and what Jehan says, Grantaire believes it, because Jehan says it, but it doesn't stop Enjolras from _looking_ godly, and it doesn't stop Grantaire from dreaming about it. “Jehan, if Zeus had chosen me to deliver Eres’ golden apple to the most beautiful, I would not have hesitated and Enjolras would be the one to eventually make Troy and myself fall.”

“Look at you,” Jehan teased him. “All these years I’ve been trying to get you interested in the Romantic greats, when all it took to have you wax poetic was a tired and passionate student at your doorstep.”  

“He does charity work, Jehan,” Grantaire wails mournfully. “He probably jumps out into the street to save puppies from getting hit by reckless car drivers. He probably goes to children’s hospitals and wears the red noses. He leads a _social activist group._ He probably owns a _coat hanger,_ Jehan. I think if he spoke to me of ideals and morals and civic duty for a few more weeks, even _I’d_ believe in something.”

“Ah, Courfeyrac asked me to come to one of their meetings with him, you know.”

Grantaire nibbles slowly at his wine-drenched apple bits, shaking his head a little to be able to see Jehan’s twinkling eyes through the dark curls hanging in front of his eyes. “Did you go?”

“I might,” Jehan says. “I’d like to be more involved in the messy politics of our country, if I can.”

“What of Courfeyrac? Has he noticed your eyes shine a little brighter when near him, or the meanings of the flowers you put in the vase near his little desk?”

“Ah,” Jehan moans dramatically, “ _If nothing saves us from death, at least love should save us from life,_  but my love is hopelessly blind, and also a fool. He doesn’t see a thing, R, and I wonder if I should just walk up to him and use my words like a sensible man.”

“Of course neither of us have ever had any pretence of being sensible,” Grantaire says.

“Never at all,” Jehan agrees, then easily dangles his free arm around Grantaire’s shoulders. “You really do still have far too few lights in here, grand R. Once more, you lack in Holiday spirit.”

Grantaire leans his head on Jehan’s shoulder, accepting the contact that comes easy to them, as it does to all his friends, and therefore easier to himself. “Spirit, perhaps, but not spirits.”

“I’ll bring lights,” Jehan promises. “Strings of them. Bring some colour back into your life. The sun goes down far too early these days, where I go to work in darkness and leave in darkness.”

Grantaire murmurs in agreement. “Maybe some mistletoe, too, just in case.”

This makes Jehan laugh, higher in pitch than Grantaire’s, and rounded around the edges, soft. “I think you’re going to be great, R,” he says. “I think this is good for you.”

“Wine?”

“Not the wine, though you did make it well.”

Jehan pats him on the upper arm when he grumbles, then, puts aside his mug and their half-emptied pot of wine, and tries to get up enough to reach for the top of the stack of books without dislodging Grantaire. He only half succeeds, and Grantaire plays up his grumbles about it just for the dramatics of it.

Jehan pats him good-naturedly on the hair. “It’s not bad to let people get to know you, you know.”

Grantaire wants to object, but he has good company and cheap wine coursing through his veins, and thus, his mouth doesn’t open properly enough. Instead, he thinks, you’re wrong, if people got to know me they’d drown. They’d waltz into a swamp and I’d hold their heads down in the muck, or they’d get tangled up in roots, or dragged down by the creatures and shadows in the depths of it. You’re wrong, Jean Prouvaire, because everyone will leave eventually. You’re wrong, because I don’t believe anyone is as saintly as the people who know me now, willing to peel me off a kitchen floor in sweat easily seven days old and tell me to take a shower.

Jehan doesn’t hear his thoughts, but he knows them, like he knows everything, like he reads it off people’s faces and their mannerisms. So, Jehan opens his book, and reads, voice clear, ringing in Grantaire’s ears and bouncing through his skull. “To begin at the beginning: it is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black," and Grantaire listens, can’t do anything else but hang on.

That night, Grantaire sleeps better than he has in weeks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey everyone! i hope you all had a great easter!


	10. Another Sunday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things go south, as sometimes they're wont to do.

_Another Sunday._

Enjolras shows up just when he’s debating opening his second bottle and forego the mulling process, which would be really nice in the moment but which he’d regret after. Enjolras carries a heavy shoulder bag in with him, and a brown paper bag Grantaire hopes contain pastries. Pastries Enjolras sometimes collects even though he has the opposite of a sweet tooth, because Grantaire said he liked them with cinnamon sugar or pudding-filled. (It doesn’t mean anything. Nothing at all. They’re perhaps, at the most, reluctant barely-acquaintances, forced together because Grantaire was too pathetic to go to the corner shop and get his own groceries, and that’s that.) (It won’t last.)

In the weeks (months?) Enjolras has been visiting, interspersed with visits from his friends, the papers usually strewn about his floor and furniture have been somewhat roughly gathered into stacks, sorted by what was close together, not necessarily subject, some of his books have migrated back to the open cabinet he once used as a bookcase, and he has more clean mugs than neglected, paint-stained ones. Tacked to the walls are some several metres of fairy lights Jehan brought and installed, and a wreath is haphazardly attached to his door with double-sided tape that _might_ last the week. Joly left him several blankets, some with ugly patchwork he suspects Jehan picked out and donated, and Éponine, annoyed at his reluctance to keep heating up water for his hot water bottles, gave him a cheap kettle to plug into the wall and use until it gives up. Some of his more tourist-minded paintings, of dreamy views over the Seine or glorified scenes of Montmartre, were sold and the loss of them made his room slightly less cramped. He feels the very definition of Holiday spirit, even with the cracks in his walls letting in more cold air, or the mould in his bathroom which now makes him cough and hack when he showers.

He’s even done the somewhat responsible thing and purchased pillows, a small mountain of them, and thrown them on his sofa without reason or pattern. Maybe, he thinks, if he lets himself sink into them, he’ll disappear to another world and no-one will find him again.

He reasons, also, that it’s too late now to pay his gas bills and get his heating back on because there’s really only one season left to go before Spring, and logically speaking, he won’t need it by then anymore. It’d have no use, and it’s better for the environment this way. Global warming is a serious issue, Enjolras, isn’t he aware of this, perhaps he should consider cold showers too if he’s really so involved with the world.

Grantaire is fully stretched out across his sofa, pillows lumped beneath him and a multicolour patchwork quilt covering his legs. He’s trying to keep the muscles of his back and his legs as clenched as possible, in some silly paranoid fear if he doesn’t he’ll fall victim to the black hole of his pillows and disappear when he’d rather leave that for the times he doesn’t have any visitors at all.

Between them is the bag of pastries, carefully torn, Enjolras taking the ones not filled with sweetness and brushing the sugar transferred from Grantaire’s pastries off them. Grantaire balances his sketchbook on his knees, pencil in one hand, pastry in the other, once in a while stopping for a small bite or to thoughtfully lick sugar off the surface. Enjolras speaks, and sometimes he answers, but he’s not fully aware of what’s being said by either of them.

“So how old were you when you left home, then?”

Grantaire chews at the end of his pencil, tasting rubber. He doesn’t use it to erase much, regardless, so chewing is its only use. “Seventeen,” he mumbles. “So, uh… oh, man, already seven years ago. Time flies when you’re having fun.”

“You’re twenty-four?” Enjolras asks from where he’s draped over Grantaire's armchair like the suffering subject of a pietá, clutching a book. “That’s only a year older than I am.”

Grantaire faintly spits out a small chunk of rubber and licks at his puff pastry to fill his mouth with the taste of caramelised sugar instead. “I was born late in the year, so perhaps less than a full one.” He realises he’s probably missed and forgotten his own birthday.  

“You went to the Paris-Sorbonne, right?” Enjolras asks him, taking a new pastry from the bag with the same hand he’s holding a half-drained mug of tea in (earthenware, novelty, no humorous lettering, just fish in various colours, from the aquarium gift shop, purchased by Grantaire himself.) “I joined late because I wanted to work an internship a few months beforehand.  Maybe I’ve seen you around campus.”

Grantaire laughs from over his sketchbook, refining the lines around Enjolras’ face. It isn’t the first time he’s tried drawing him, and it won’t be the last. It’s hard to transfer feeling of this calibre to paper, Grantaire supposes. “Very unlikely,” he says, at last.

Enjolras frowns. “I would have remembered you, I think.”

“Even less likely, Apollo. I don’t exactly stand out. Mostly try not to, in a crowd at least.” He shades curls, debates whether adding a halo would be too much. “Besides, I only stayed for only the few months of a semester.”

“You never finished?” Enjolras sounds so baffled by just the very thought of it Grantaire is reminded he’s not usually forced to confront such failure; that Enjolras must have, just by birth, been destined to succeed at everything he does. The politics student, meant to change the world, and Grantaire in the backdrop, somewhere, shining his boots and brushing dust off his jacket, if Enjolras even lets him hang around that long. The thought reminds him he’s got half full glass waiting for him on the table, and he drops his pastry, reaches out for it, tips it back, feeling the alcohol burn his throat. He’s more awake, suddenly. “Well, Apollo, they don’t exactly like it when you never come to classes,” he drawls sarcastically. “They stopped giving out Least Attendance ribbons probably the day before you got in.”

Enjolras is silent for a little bit, his face covered by his book enough Grantaire wishes he’d lower it so he could watch the displeasure on it. “Don’t you want to go back?” he says eventually.

Grantaire doesn’t add the halo. He turns his sketchbook page and starts a new one, lady Liberty holding Enjolras like Mary did Jesus. The lamentation of love, maybe. Lamentation of equality, or freedom, or Grantaire’s love life, for the rest of his life. “Nope.” He pops the ‘p’, and really, very sincerely hopes Enjolras will drop it. He won’t, of course, but idle, wasted small hope comes naturally to him these days, apparently. Maybe he should use his watercolours for this, he thinks. His paper is right for it, and he likes them. They’d be perfect for soft features. It could—

“Why?” Enjolras asks sincerely, not unkindly, stupidly beautiful face still hidden between the pages of a book Grantaire doesn’t even like owning because it’s got all the wrong opinions and not enough facts about gothic architecture. “It’s not that you’re not smart enough for it. You’re clearly well-read and your memory is sound enough to quote things you’ve read maybe once perfectly. I’ve checked.”

When Grantaire doesn’t reply for a little while, focused on the mournful tilt of Lady Liberty’s eyebrows, Enjolras tilts down his book, and Grantaire is treated to the knowledge of what genuine confusion and bafflement, slight frustration, looks like on angelic features. “You know,” Enjolras continues. “I think you’re capable of so much more than this. Than what you think you are, that is.”

Grantaire’s brain shrieks to a dangerous halt and falls deadly silent.

Grantaire can't accept compliments, slightly double-edged or not, very well or at all, and won't hear anyone say anything nice about himself, much less believe it. He's not a therapist, but he's spent many hours thinking and dissecting and he knows it might just be because he really, desperately doesn't want to create expectations. Doesn't want to think of himself as good, and doesn't want others to think of him as such, so he doesn't fail, so he doesn't disappoint, so people always know what to expect. So, really, Grantaire does what he usually does when people tell him something kind about him.

Grantaire gets angry.

He draws his shoulders together until he feels his neck burn. “We can’t all be perfect little cogs in the wheel of academics, Apollo,” he bites out. “I realise failure is a human trait, and they haven’t given you that software upgrade yet, but not everyone should have to go through the most of what they can to be worthy of your approval. All a degree would do for me is make me overqualified for most if not all work I could do to get me the living wage art _won’t._ Add to that I don’t have a real job and I won’t be motivated enough to get one even if I was in real danger of being evicted, which still remains the question. _”_  

Enjolras tilts his head at him as if trying to figure out what could have possibly gone wrong between now and the ten seconds before. “I think if someone has the means and talent to be something, to make an impact and do something that matters, and if they have the opportunity to do so, that they should.”

“Right.” Grantaire presses the tip of his pencil into the paper slightly too hard, and it breaks and bends to the side, silently, no crack or dramatics. “Right, because it’s easy to look at other people and judge them for all the things they haven’t done. You think people like myself, who choose the easy route, to have a chance and squander or ignore it, you think we’re the worst kind of people.”

“I do,” Enjolras says, picking up on his mood pervading the room and inhaling it, every muscle in his body tensing and the clack of his jaw audible. “Though I think _this_ is hardly the easy route, is it?”

Grantaire wants to put down his pencil, because he’s worried he’ll snap it in half, and it’s his last 4B, and he doesn’t want to have to find an outlet that’ll allow him to buy a single 4B pencil, but his fingers are clumsy with tension and he drops it halfway in between him and the table.

“No. But it’s cowardice, isn’t it?” Grantaire says, trying to leak his signature traces of humour and self-deprecation back into his voice, so he doesn’t have to listen to what it’s doing now, cold and sounding as though from a stranger. “I'm a coward, right? That's what you're thinking. I'm a coward to hide in here when there's so much out there and I'm too much of a namby-pamby to face it."

Enjolras barely opens his mouth when he speaks next, his voice coming more from his teeth than his throat. "I don't think you're a coward."

"Yes. You do." Grantaire laughs, wants to laugh, bitterly, but it comes out more cracked and stuttering. "Yes, you do."

“You _could_ do more, though,” Enjolras says, clearly frustrated now. “You _could._ You paint, and I may not understand art but I know that people purchase yours. You have an online following, and you have a brain in your skull. You _could.”_

Grantaire doesn’t say he doesn’t know a single person who doesn’t have a brain, but his fights him at every turn, whether it’s about getting the morning newspaper or whether it’s about getting up from bed at all or wait until his stomach and heart eat each other. He hasn’t ever felt like his brain wanted him to be capable of a great many things, constantly at odds with each other as they were. He shrugs, instead.

Enjolras swings his legs around so he’s sitting straight in his chair, (in Grantaire’s chair, in the chair Grantaire’s been using in lieu of a bed more often than he has his mattress) straightening his back. “You’re so _frustrating,”_ he says, fists clenched next to his thighs. “Aggravating! So incredibly aggravating.”

“Why’s that, Apollo?” Grantaire feels his face grin but doesn’t feel the associated feelings. He just feels hollow, and a little bit sick, and he’s praying he won’t hurl and throw up the half of his pastry he’s eaten onto his sketchbook, because it was expensive, and the paper is thick. “Because you’re realising there’s a cause that’s well and truly hopeless after all? I could have told you that. I _did_ tell you that. You can’t get mad when I warned you from the start you were wasting your time. I mean, you _can_ , who could refuse you anything, really? But in the spirit of fairness, you wouldn’t have the right.”

Enjolras angrily ruffles his hair, fluffs it with rough movements. Grantaire intently watches the colours from the fairy lights dance over his curls, even now, five seconds from implosion. Even now. “The only reason you’re so fond of declaring yourself hopeless is that you’re so _determinedly inept.”_

Unwilling to remain within so few feet of Enjolras, the heat of him no longer pleasant, too overwhelming, and wouldn’t Jehan love his poetic metaphor in relation to the sun, Grantaire gets up, untangling himself from his quilt, and stumbles to the kitchen. He busies himself with filling his kettle, staring resolutely at his hands. He’s a little hypnotised by the water filling up the meter on the side of it, telling him he’s put in more than is usually recommended, that if he turns it on it might boil over. He flips the switch.

The loud rushing of water heating up fills the room, but he can barely hear it over his own breaths, over the loud wind in his head, howling through his skull. “Yep, that’s it,” he throws over his shoulder when he realises their silence has gone on too long and the air in his home is still saturated and thick with frustration and annoyance. He hadn’t thought of what to do with himself once he was done filling the kettle, so now he flounders. “I’m really nothing but a drunk, often sad, often belligerent, and you’re free to leave whenever that doesn’t suit you anymore.”

“That’d be easy, wouldn’t it?” Enjolras doesn’t have to raise his voice to be heard. He says something, anything, and it cuts through Grantaire like knives through butter, always listening, always taking in all of it like it’s air. Grantaire wishes he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, that Enjolras was a little less compelling or the waves rushing through his ears a little bit louder. “It’s easier for you to just stick to this little _routine,_ to gratuitously waste every opportunity ever handed to you on a platter, and maybe eventually people will leave you alone and stop nagging at you to be _better_ so you can continue behaving like an _infant.”_  

The kettle boils, clicks, shuts off.

"No, no, you'd rather stay here,” Enjolras spits at him. “Wallow, mope around, drink yourself half to death and pity yourself and wrap your own agony around you like a blanket so you won't have to face anything real, anything _difficult,_ and I can’t imagine anyone, much less our friends, willingly being around you or feeling any positive feeling for you whatsoever."

Grantaire’s hands are still on the counter, the rushing inside of him so loud he can’t hear his own voice when he says, "neither can I."

Enjolras is still talking, why is he _still_ talking, why is Grantaire still staring at the small spider near his water tap like it’s going to give him the answers to this, like it’s going to tell him the secret to disappearing completely.

“So you’d just— you really, honestly want your life to be like what it is? You’re fine like this? You could _change_ things, you could be someone, someone who _changes_ things, and if you’d only take up the drive, you _would,_ but instead, _instead_ you’d like to keep on doing nothing?”

“Are you sure this is still about University, Apollo? Because it sounds to me like you’re attempting to rope me into one of your little protests. Some people can’t fight and change things; they’re too busy trying to just live. Or, survive, really.”

Enjolras bares his teeth, furious. “So you do _nothing._ This is your grand solution to everything,” he bites out, voice lowered dangerously, and Grantaire desperately wants more of it. He forces himself to not turn. “I'd rather show I'm doing the best I can to not be complicit in the world's wrongs than give up, even if it’s no use, as you say. But you, you’ve been standing on the sidelines for all your twenty-four years, just watching, sneering and laughing because those around you were foolish, stupid to ever expect any help to come at all? You think people being mistreated should just grit their teeth, bite their cheeks and beg for death, because that’s more merciful than wanting and working for things to change?”

Grantaire expects to feel cold, like after his showers. Instead, he feels warm, feverishly so, and his heart pumps more blood through his body than it needs to. "Sure," Grantaire breezes. "Sure! I'm a regular villain that way. I love watching the agony in people, I love laughing at misery. It doesn't keep me awake at night. I’m a cold-hearted monster. I'm the true enemy of the people. The one who doesn't believe in anything, who does nothing, who scoffs at people who hold onto good things, because he can't. The one who envies them, the people who _feel_ about things, who get happiness and keep it, because he knows he will never, ever have it. Green with it, he is, with that envy.”

He itches to grab everything on his kitchen counter, everything inside his cabinets, every bottle and bowl and plate, and smash it to pieces on the floor. Instead, he hangs onto the countertop, fingers curling around the edge of it, white-knuckled, waiting.   

"If you don't believe in anything,” Enjolras says after a while, “if you never do anything, if you wait constantly for things to happen to you that never will unless you change, if you continue to live a passionless, sorry excuse of a life, you might as well be dead."

Grantaire laughs, a harsh sound, not taking his eyes off the spider’s web wishing it was strong enough he could maybe strangle himself with it. "Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, and isn't that the whole point of this exercise."

Enjolras is quiet. Grantaire’s neighbours are, for once, quiet. Paris is quiet.

"I think you should go," Grantaire says.

Enjolras gets up and leaves. Grantaire doesn’t hear the door close. He breathes, deeply, willing his lungs to cooperate even though they don’t seem to want his body to live through this.

The chariot of Helios was the downfall of Phaeton. The sun killed Icarus. The sun melted his wax wings and he fell, and fell and fell and then landed in the water and died with his lungs burning, and Grantaire isn’t under any illusions the sun had any feelings about that, or even noticed any of it. He was Marsyas, had thought to challenge Apollo to a contest because he thought he could match the beautiful tones from his strings, and for his insolence, he is flayed, skin turned into a wineskin. He’s nothing but the little lizard of the Apollo Sauroktonos, _spare, treacherous child, the lizard which is crawling towards you, eager to perish by your hands._ Grantaire knows this. He knew it from the start, that it’d end like this.

Instead of burning, resisting the impulse to fill his lungs with the boiling water from his kettle, or finding a place that will deliver cheap wine directly to his doorstep, to fulfil his destiny as flayed satyr, a wineskin, and instead of _drowning,_ he forces his fingers to let go of the countertop. He walks back to his couch with unsteady legs, finds his phone from somewhere within the small mountain of pillows, and texts Éponine. His fingers are too large for the small buttons, always, but this time he doesn’t bother to focus on pressing backspace and fixing the small errors his phone refuses to fix for him. He sends her an unsteady, _please let apollo know hes not welcome._ Then, _sorry._

He throws his phone somewhere in the direction of his outlet, so he won’t forget to plug it in later, and then, still struggling to inhale, he gives up. Silently, unwilling to let his neighbours hear, walls and ceilings thin and people nosy, he cries. His kettle cools down uselessly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and so, apollo can be cruel. thank you again so much for reading my work and leaving your kudos and kind comments!! i hope everyone had a great week!!


	11. Tuesday.

_ Tuesday. _

Tuesday, he drinks, and that’s really all he’s willing to say on that matter.    
  



	12. Wednesday.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Christmas and a phone call.

_Wednesday._

Grantaire wakes with his head pounding at odds with his heartbeat, nose running from the cold, in a small pile of blankets and with springs pricking through his shirt where he pushed the pillows off so they’d stop lumping underneath his back. He wipes drool off his face, notices he’s also drooled on his own shoulder, declares being clean a lost cause. His phone buzzes, but it’s plugged into the wall, his charging cord too short to reach him, so he lets it be. He hasn’t looked at it in a couple of days, just wasn’t very keen on dealing with Éponine’s questions, or disappointment, or any other feelings at all from anyone.

He doesn’t think Enjolras will be coming today. Or any other day.

His mouth is dry and his breath horrid, like something curled up inside him and died and rotted, and maybe it had. He barely feels the pounding in his head anymore, but still slowly, with every bone in his body creaking like pots shattering, gets up to more firmly close his drapes.

His calendar, a simple one with seasonal images of animals, hangs close enough to his window he doesn’t have to get too close to it to be able to see the date. He’s only seen the November (a porcupine,) and December image (a wolf snarling at the camera), and maybe buying it this late in the year was a bit of a waste, but there’s something satisfying about crossing or striping off the days past, like a victory, like jumping hurdles and someday, maybe, he’ll get to the end of this race.

He wipes his nose again, and picks up a fine-liner, the closest thing near him, to stripe off the Tuesday, and decides he’ll take the calendar off the wall so he can see the pictures chosen to represent the other months of the year. His hand stops a little ways away from the page, fine-liner uncapped, the tip of it slowly drying. Staring at the dates, as though noticing them for the first time, he realises dimly, hollowly, that it’s Christmas. Today is Christmas.

He draws a little _x_ on the twenty-fourth, then drops the pen back onto the tray without shoving the cap back on first. He leans into his window, presses his ear up against it and holds his breath, wishing every single thing outside to be quiet for the time it takes him to inhale. Faintly, barely, he hears the bells.

He focuses, tries with all his might, on the deep, low tones, the bell Emmanuel, the thirteen-tonne bourdon bell in the south tower. It slowly fades out.

Grantaire used to feel a giddy sort of excitement in the face of Christmas, where the Holiday spirit radiating through Paris was infectious. He’d bundle himself up and go out to visit the very few hole-in-the-wall bars still open and look for the markets stubbornly open till Christmas eve. The air would smell like chestnuts, and spiced wine, sausages and raclette, and he’d look at the millions of tiny lights and walk till he felt the coldness seeping through the bottom of his shoes.

Now, though, he smells nothing but the damp, slightly musty air and fumes from his jars, and he’s not being warmed by liquor or the huddle of his coat.

His phone buzzes again, but now he has the excuse of being more than two feet away (he is, _in fact,_ he’ll have you know, four feet from it, which is far more than an arm’s length). It’s not early in the day. Late afternoon, maybe, but it’s hard to tell with his drapes shut and the sun hidden far more than usual (also a metaphor, maybe), but he still doesn’t have anywhere to be and no obligations to fulfil so he plans to grab his cheap wine, be lonely, mope and drink.

He hears, from his downstairs neighbour’s record player, through the floorboards and directly into the cold skin of his bare feet, voices drift up. A chorus of them, mingling, harmonising, making his skin break out in goosebumps and making his shoulders relax. Then, a soprano, high-pitched and in desperate Latin, accompanied by only a piano. Vittadini, probably, though Grantaire’s knowledge of Christmas operas really starts and ends with Tchaikovsky, as saturated as most Christmas days are with _Cherevichki_ and his ballets. He points his toes, the angelic chorus flowing through his veins like oxygen, and dances into his small kitchen space. His dancing isn’t as graceful as it once was, his movements a little more stunted and a little more choppy than he’d like. He doesn’t go out to do it anymore, where he used to go to a small studio with Courfeyrac, where they’d met in the first place, or would dance in clubs or merrily and drunkenly in pubs, and his apartment space is barely large enough to lay on the floor and stretch out fully in any direction. He dances through his room, filling his kettle, grabbing his wine, and the music gives him the energy to mull it after all. He sways while recklessly, without measuring, mixing in cloves, sugar and the remaining chunks of his cinnamon sticks.

Mug in hand ( _World’s Okayest Mom,_ from Gavroche), he manages this world’s slowest demi-détourné and follows it up with three clumsy emboîté turns in passé, changes to cou-de-pied in plié with the voice of their old dance instructor, her voice deep with cigarettes and smoke, telling him to _straighten his fucking back_ clear in his mind as he moves his way to his rickety easel _._

He plants his last bare canvas wobbly on top of it, feet firmly planted on the ground, as flat as he can make them, breathes in deeply and raises his leg in an _attitude_ , focusing to keep his balance. Maybe, he thinks, picking up his palette knife to scrape at the still-wet paint leftover on his palette, saving it before he’d be forced to dump it, maybe he’s alright.

Maybe it’s fine Enjolras won’t be showing up in his home anymore. He smears deep cadmium yellow onto the bottom of his palette, some of it accidentally on his hand. Maybe it’s fine things will return to how they were, because, while he wasn’t happy, and while he barely ate, and while sometimes the incredibly cold darkness of panic forced him to stay in bed, at least he knew what to expect. He knew what to do, though not how to solve anything, and that was _fine._

He mixes his linseed oil in with his paints and draws a large, yellow-gold line along the top of his canvas. And maybe, his brain adds for him, maybe he’s better off without— he stabs his brush into the reds leftover from his landscapes— without condescension, and judgment, and scorn. _Maybe,_ just maybe, nothing, not even a single glance, being disregarded and overlooked, is better than derision.

It doesn’t sound that convincing even to himself.

It must snow outside because outside is silent, footsteps and wheels muffled. Grantaire personally thinks snowfall rules, but he also knows it’s a silent, cold death for the many in Paris who don’t have any place to sleep but in it. He thinks of the people walking past the beggars, too intent on worrying on how the snow would ruin their boots or the legs of their paints to notice the poor freezing to death outside of overfull shelters. The view would be nice, he thinks, and what more could a man ask for, save for a roof over his head, food and warm clothing.

He bitterly mixes darker blues and browns. He thinks of poetry, he thinks of _am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without meaning,_ and he thinks of Jehan’s yellow jumper, one with a reckless and bright sunflower pattern, trying to bring life to the death of winter.

Grantaire paints, drinking his wine as it cools enough to not burn his tongue and the roof of his mouth, paints without looking, the opera drifting up at him still drowning out anything other but the constant flow of his thoughts about nothing, nothing at all. His palm leaves a long streak of red across his arm when he uses it to push up his sleeve.

Maybe, _just_ maybe, Grantaire thinks, Enjolras isn't a god at all. It might just be that he isn’t, he just has the appearance of one. Grantaire knows that, despite instinctively comparing himself to the worm and Enjolras to the marble on the pedestal, and he knows that, though cruel as gods can also be, Enjolras bleeds when cut just like he would. He’s no better than Grantaire in some things, though he is in many others.

This, somehow, doesn't make him hurt less.

Below him, the record skips, once, twice, and then there’s short silence, a muffled curse in a language Grantaire doesn’t exactly speak but knows how to tell someone how to get to the nearest good restaurant in. He lowers and straightens his leg, the lack of music threatening to break his focus and his balance.

He eagerly awaits the return of Mme. Brodeur’s records, knowing she doesn’t like sitting in silence too long, and selfishly comforted by the fact she clearly doesn’t have anywhere to be on a Christmas day either, but instead, he’s nearly startled into dropping his mug by a shrill, rhythmic beeping he recognises after a few beeps as Mozart’s fortieth from the direction of his wall.

He strolls over, feet dragging over the parquet, all the energy and will leaving him as soon as silence in his apartment fell and not returning with the horrible eight bit classical dancing through the air. He doesn’t have to look at his screen to know who would be calling him, and so he doesn’t, pressing the green horn and pushing his phone to his ear. “R’s house of oddities and monstrosities, how may I help you?”

“Har de har,” Éponine laughs at him sarcastically. “I’m looking for a sarcastic loser dipshit, devastatingly handsome, only feed after midnight.”

Grantaire purses his lips as he hums. “Hmm, I’m afraid we’re fresh out, mademoiselle. I could put in an order for you.”

“I don’t need him _that_ badly, any dipshit will do.”

Grantaire allows himself a laugh, flopping down on the floor, his back leaning against the edge of his table. “In that case, I’d be free to assist you personally.”

“Oooh,” Éponine drawls. “Personal service, for little ol’ me? You shouldn’t have.”

Grantaire kicks his feet up against the wall so he’s just about folded in half in between it and his small coffee table, and rubs the hand not holding the phone on his stained sweatpants to warm his stiff fingers a little. “Only the best for Paris’ finest.”

Éponine laughs, but Grantaire can tell her heart isn’t fully in it, has heard her do it too much before she took Gavroche and left home, and too much at him. Éponine sighs. “So it didn’t work out, huh?”

Grantaire doesn’t have to ask what didn’t and doesn’t try to continue their little joke. He forces levity, and says, “don’t think so, no.”

“What happened? I mean, he stayed for just about three months. You’d think there wasn’t anything you could do that’d make him leave if you heard him talk.”

“What makes you think _I_ did anything,” Grantaire snaps. “Unapproachable, miserable Grantaire. You know I’m not like that, Ép. I can laugh with the best of you. I’m not thoughtlessly cruel, nor am I a sad little trembling lump of meat.”

Éponine sighs. “I know you’re not. I know you can, R. So what happened? We didn’t think anything could keep Enjolras away, with his annoying little convictions and morals and revolutionary fervour.”

“I told him to leave,” R says simply. “And he did. That’s what there is to it. I’m not good enough for his standards, too much dirt and failure clinging to the very pores of me, and too little will to rise above the common rabble. _Lord_ knows he’s so far above that.”

Éponine sighs, tinny and loud, a small storm wind in his ear. “Did he say that?”

“In no uncertain terms, I’m a coward, and it’s _unimaginable_ for him to imagine people being around me on their own volition,” Grantaire spits, focusing on the pinpricks of heat rushing through his fingers as he rubs them on the side of his thigh fast enough to create static energy, the words rushing from him like vomit. “My incompetence is aggravating, even more so than the competence I possess and don’t use, and he thinks me a waste, and that’s the end of it. He didn’t say anything untrue, didn’t say anything I didn’t already know, I just don’t like hearing it, and so I threw him out.”

He manages, barely, to keep steady control of his breathing, although the entire rest of him is trembling. His voice is steady, or as steady as he can manage it, and he instead redirects the shivers trying to make his words waver towards his chest, arms and legs, uselessly jiggling his foot where it’s against the wall above him.

Éponine is quiet for a little while, then he hears her typing, fingers moving rapidly over her keyboard. He realises he’s on speakerphone. “So, I’m going to kill him,” she begins. “And then I’m going to come over, and I’m going to take Gavroche with me, and then we’re going to make dinner, because God knows you’re better at it than I am and you’re going to tell me how much of stuff to use and how to not burn the water.”

Grantaire nods, throat tight, and then laughs a little bit. “Sure.”

“And then,” she continues steadily, as soon as she’s heard him agree. “Later, Jehan is coming by, and he’s probably going to wear tinsel in his hair and also make you wear it. He’s wearing a reindeer sweater, R. The ones with the pom pom nose. You have to tell him it looks good. Maybe we can get Bahorel to show because out of all his drinking buddies, you’re his favourite. Joly and Bossuet are out tonight because they’re not pathetically single, but they wanted to give you a good scotch, so I’ll take it with me.” Then, much softer, she adds, “alright?”

Grantaire doesn’t know if his mouth will move or if he’s capable of making sound come out of him, but after a few seconds he manages a croaky, “sure,” and he knows Éponine knows him well enough to know it to mean _thank_ you and _please._

“Then I’ll see you when my shift ends, yeah? We’re five now, so that’s in an hour, and then I’ll pick Gavroche up and it’ll be just half an hour more till we’re stomping up four flights of stairs to get to you, and you’re just going to have to deal and live with all of it.”

“Alright.” He should reheat his mulled wine before then, and open a window so Gavroche isn’t breathing in the chemicals that come with being a painter, and he should clear space, and maybe wash his face and brush his teeth so he doesn’t smell like he ate roadkill. “See you then, Ép.”

“See you soon, R.”

The line goes dead, and he realises below him, his neighbour is playing a different opera. Something in English he doesn’t recognise. He gets up, slowly, swinging his legs to the side and rolling himself right side up, and moves to clear his table.

Gavroche barrels in just when he’s debating on how thickly to slice his apple, Éponine not far behind him, carrying a small bag of groceries and a large bottle of scotch, and Grantaire abandons the thought, cutting thick chunks and handing one to Gavroche when he hops himself onto the counter. “Hello, demon child.”

“Evenin’,” Gavroche greets him, schooling his face into faked haughtiness. “One apple chunk is all I get for travelling all this way through the snow and the cold?”

Grantaire gives him another two, and after dropping a few slices into the wine, just slides him the full rest of the apple.

Gavroche scoops them all up into his small hands. “That’s better.”

Éponine laughs, walking over after dropping her bag and scarf by the sofa. “I’ll take more alcoholic offerings instead.”

"Now that," Grantaire grins, sliding another mug over the countertop towards her. "That I can do."

He plays Monopoly with them, fiercely trying to stop Gavroche from upending the game board for nothing but shits and giggles, _what’s the point of even playing if the board stays upright, R, this is what’s supposed to happen,_ and he and Éponine dance badly to the record player in the room below his. They do burn dinner. Grantaire’s head is full of cotton balls, and he stared at a stain borne from water-damage instead of stirring. Éponine doesn’t comment.  

Jehan visits around eight, bearing gifts of sandwiches filled with meats bought from street vendors choosing to spend their Christmas making as much money as possible, wearing a very horrible sweater Grantaire tells him brings out his eyes, and lot of tinsel in his hair, and when he notices Grantaire's lack of Christmas attire, he tuts and braids some of it into Grantaire's own. Bahorel tumbles through the door not long after, filling up the entire doorway, cheeks red with the cold and wine on his breath. He shows them the wine and gin behind his back, and they cheer and clap when he does a clumsy Riverdance getting to them, faire la bise for every occupant of the room.

Bahorel demands to wrestle him to see if he’s been keeping up with his training (he hasn’t.) Gavroche cheers for whoever seems to be winning, and they knock over multiple stacks of books and Grantaire’s easel before Grantaire is willing to admit defeat, Bahorel sitting on top of him and wrenching the very air from his body with his weight alone.

It's well past midnight when they leave Grantaire a few feet from his door opening, feeling warm and less lonely than he ever has. He starts a little when the pipes creak, his upstairs neighbour getting home from their own festivities and briefly using the tap, then walks back around the sofa. Jehan had taken it upon himself to wrap the take-out leftovers back in the white plastic bags they came from and put them on the kitchen counters, and he’s already looking forward to unwrapping them again in the next afternoon.

He’ll be fine, he thinks, when he eventually curls back up into his armchair, wrapping himself in the warm quilts and listening to the soft sounds from outside with only half an ear and a quarter of his mind. He’s fine.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a double update because one was unforgivably short! thank you again so much for your interest, your comments and your kudos, and if there's any errors i ask you to politely turn your head and look away


	13. The very next Tuesday.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> New year's rolls around. Grantaire gets a text.

_The very next Tuesday._

Grantaire has no grand plans for the very last day of the year. He thinks, maybe today he’ll paint more tourist dribble, more romantic skies over the Conciergerie, or dramatic clouds over the Moulin Rouge, or even, for the visiting students, the skulls of the dark and gruesome Catacombes. He’s sitting in his chair, his heels nearly tucked under his ass and his bare toes curling around the edge of the cushion, quilt draped over his shoulders and mug of tea in his palms (mug, in blocked script, reading _there are two kinds of people: 1. Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data_ , from Joly). 

Éponine called yesterday, as she does most Mondays, and blessedly didn’t bring up any blonde gods or even blonde mortals, nor did she mention anything about setting him up with new volunteers. Grantaire loves her more than he knows or loves his sister. Maybe he’ll paint her instead. 

His online commission queue is nearly fully backed up, and he really ought to grab his sketchpad and make sure he gets through his backlog of sexy lizard people and political cartoons, but he wants to stay here and not move, and so he does. He feels odd and slightly detached in a way he hasn’t in a while, and feels quite justified sitting in his chair with his hoodie strings tied under his chin and drinking his _winter glow_ spice blend. 

He loses time when he picks up one of Jehan’s books, the stamp on the small library card telling him it’s already more than a week late. In the middle of _time held me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea,_ his phone chirps at him, sound still on for reasons beyond him. He picks it up with one hand, places his thumb in between his pages as a temporary bookmark, and glances at his screen for as long as it’s lit up. 

 

From: Unknown

15:31

_Hi_

 

He frowns, memorises his page number and stretches his legs fully, waiting for the pins and needles to stop before he puts his book down. He leans his legs on his coffee table and grabs his phone with both hands, unlocks it and taps at his messages app. His phone buzzes in his hand again while he’s trying to find it, almost startling him into dropping it. 

 

From: Unknown

15:31

_Hi_

 

From: Unknown

15:36

_This is Enjolras_

 

Well. He spends a minute trying to talk himself out of answering, of stubbornly ignoring Enjolras until he leaves him alone like he’s still trying to tell himself he wants. After that minute, he tells himself he’s done significant resisting to seem genuine, and taps out a, _how did u get my number,_  and then, _this is grantaire_ just to be a dickhead. He saves Enjolras as a contact after a little bit of hassle trying to remember how, and tries to tell himself he’s being ironic putting the little sun after the lowercase _apollo._  

 

From: apollo (sun)

15:40

_Eponine gave it to me. She did in no uncertain terms say it was very recommended I apologise to you or she would slice my behind into bits. My ears are still ringing._

 

Grantaire snorts. _Ur behind, huh. a valuable ASSet. ill tell her u did so u dont have to worry about it._ He takes a precious few seconds correcting the uppercase ‘U’ at the start of his sentence to a lowercase, his phone trying to fight his attempt at casual texting with auto-correct. The irony of painstakingly changing single letters in his texts to seem more low-effort doesn’t escape him, but he chooses firmly to ignore it. 

 

From:apollo (sun)

15:42

_That joke wasn’t very good. No, you don’t have to. I would have done out of my own volition if I had your number, and I wasn’t sure you’d open the door if I knocked._

 

_it was good!! it was a fine joke!! u know i dont have a lock right?? u couldve just waltzed in._ Grantaire wiggles his toes, and the paper under them crinkles and bends. _thought we decided ur heroic and efforts were wasted on me?_

 

This time, he has to wait longer. He watches the three little bubbles dance on his screen for so long he decides he may as well get up and go do something to shorten the waiting time. Maybe something that’ll make him seem actually busy instead of someone who waits by his phone for ten minutes for a regular, relaxing text message. He sets up his easel from where he hadn’t set it back up since Christmas, and it has trouble remaining standing on its own. Good easels are expensive, so he makes do with barely passable ones, and it looks like this might be one he needs to replace at a point sooner rather than later. 

He’s busy collecting his canvas, hoping the paint on it hasn’t gotten damaged beyond repair or so full of hairs and dust it’d dried into it, when his phone dings again. And then again. And then again. He _casually_ runs for the table when he’d left it, having to make a graceful turn to avoid slipping and falling over an abandoned painter’s cloth. 

 

From:apollo (sun)

15:59

_I shouldn’t have said those things, even if I did foolishly believe all of them. I may not understand why you don’t go out, or understand why you do the things you do, but that doesn’t give me the right to be cruel. I apologise._

 

From:apollo (sun)

16:00 

_You… don’t have a lock._

 

From:apollo (sun)

16:00 

_You’re very lucky your apartment building is difficult to find. For criminals, that is._

 

Grantaire reads the messages five, six, seven times, phone held loosely in one hand, the other feeling at the paint on his canvas where it’s not _quite_ touch dry, and in places slightly textured in ways he hadn’t done with his brush. He wasn’t pressing hard enough for the paint to leave residue on his fingers; just a soft brushing to ground himself. 

He stares at his phone long enough he has to unlock it thrice. Eventually, he takes a deep breath, erases several _i’m sorry too’s,_ and one-handedly types, _its fine, u didnt say anything i didnt already know and wasnt super aware of so like. its fine!_ Then, _triple texting, apollo? how uncouth!_

Despite the long wait in between Enjolras’ last message and Grantaire’s response, Grantaire’s phone dings with a new text within the short amount of time it takes him to hit send, draw a very deep breath in through his nostrils, and breathe it back out through his mouth. 

 

From:apollo (sun)

16:14

_I was wrong, in saying it and thinking it._

 

From:apollo (sun)

16:16

_I just had more to say. Should I have waited for your response first? But then my other messages would have seemed out of place._

 

From:apollo (sun)

16:16

_Do you need a locksmith?_

 

From:apollo (sun)

16:17

_Ah, I just did it again._

 

Grantaire bites his lip so hard he feels like it might split or snap and slide off his face, into a puddle on the floor. This is stupid, this sucks, this is the worst, but he still paces back and forth typing out and deleting and typing out and deleting more messages. He’s very likely driving his neighbour mad with the drag of his feet on the floor, probably easily heard through her ceiling, but she’s going to have to forgive him. _Dont need a locksmith, its fine! pretty sure when darwin went on about natural selection he meant murderers taking out idiots without door locks, like in the movies._ He backspaces his ‘Dont’ until it stops correcting him when he starts it with a lowercase ‘d’ instead. He’s casual. _‘Sides,_ he adds, _i dont have valuable shit for people to kill me over. + ive got the righteous god apollo by my side to smite intruders._ Backspace. Lowercase ‘s’. 

 

From:apollo (sun)

16:26

_Google tells me I ought to visit the BHV department store for locks, but isn’t the Quincaillerie Leclercq relatively close to you? I’ll check them next time I visit. Though I don’t know much of installing the locks, and I imagine you don’t want a stranger to do that for you. If all else fails, I can check the market by the_ _Porte de Clignancourt._

 

From:apollo (sun)

16:27

_You have your art. They might want that. No triple texting this time, see? I managed somehow._

 

Enjolras is looking for locks for him; Enjolras wants to actively have a part in Grantaire not getting mugged or murdered. Enjolras thinks his art is valuable. Enjolras makes jokes. Even if it might take him three years to make another, Grantaire is the recipient. 

Grantaire’s fingers suddenly itch for his palette, for his pastels, for anything if it’s just to paint, so he does. 

_i think providing my door with a lock would just force them to take the hinges out. theyre barely hangin on as is. if they really did want my silly paintings, i mean,_ he types, barely focused on the canvas next to him, where he’s smoothing out the creases of the floor and carefully removing lint with the palette knife and layering on more paint, slowly refining his strokes. _Or the wall. i think it’d collapse with one strong shoulder, tho i appreciate the concern for my fragile life. u dont have to go through all this trouble! go!! save kittens from trees!!!!_

 

From:apollo (sun)

16:41

_I don’t have to, but I will._

 

From:apollo (sun)

16:42

_Your living conditions are a little concerning. Are you sure your building is fully legal?_

 

He forgets to wipe his fingers on a cloth before he replies. _Im so sure it’s not but the poltergeists lower the rent and i only wake up to tormented screaming and my chairs floatign like once a month so theyre polite at least._ His screen is almost fully yellow fingerprints and swipes when he’s done, and he winces, grabbing a wipe to save it before it dries. 

 

From:apollo (sun)

16:45

_Floating*_

 

Grantaire laughs, and he nearly drops his brush at the sound of it in his quiet room. _i said what i said!!_

 

From:apollo (sun)

16:48

_Sigh._

 

Grantaire types out and sends an incredibly fast _nerd you dont have to type it out,_ but Enjolras is still typing. 

 

From:apollo (sun)

16:50

_I’ll go by the shops sometime this week. If you know anyone who’s capable with screwdrivers, I’m sure they can help you use them better than I ever could._

 

From:apollo (sun)

16:53

_I have to go, meeting starts soon. See you tomorrow?_

 

Grantaire dances a little in place. _Yea, see u tomorrow._ Overwhelmed, hopping and swaying, he does the only thing he can think of to do, which is throw himself face-first into his sofa, and dial Éponine’s number. She picks up on the fourth ring. “Fuck you,” he says, with zero heat or anger. 

“You’re welcome, dickweed,” she says, as far past greetings as they are at this point in their friendship. “I can’t believe have to do everything myself around here.” 

“Thanks, or whatever,” Grantaire mumbles into the pillow smushed underneath his cheek. 

“You’re welcome,” she says, pleasantly. Grantaire’s phone buzzes where it’s pressed into his cheek and ear, and the sudden loud noise startles him. Éponine laughs, because she’s a demon from Hell, and hangs up. 

He looks at his phone. 

 

From:apollo (sun)

17:12

_Happy new year._

 

He groans until he’s out of breath. And this really isn't sustainable, Grantaire figures. Being a pet project, a little interesting thing Enjolras is briefly occupied by before he gets bored and moves onto the next thing. That's not sustainable. It won't last forever. But that doesn't matter, Grantaire's heart tells him, because he apparently stopped thinking with his brain long ago. That doesn't matter, because just being here, now, is enough. Icarus did definitely die, excruciatingly, fallen to the ocean and left there till he had no air in him left, but before that, he lived. Before that, he flew. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took me verifiable AGES to get up! ive been doing a lot of commissions lately and i got a JOB. that said, NANO is nearly rolling around again and i want to get my 50 from last year up before i allow myself to write MORE. thank you again for all your comments and kudos and enthusiasm!

**Author's Note:**

> finally finally finally got the courage to get this up! im posting this in chapters so i can get it beta read better, but this little thing comes from a very personal place, so i hope you like it! ill try to update with a new day every week, and some will be much longer or shorter than others. thank you! im on twitter at @ttjesje if you want to say hi!


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